To release on iOS (which is not the major market any more btw) outside of the App Store consider Cydia.
There's millions of jailbroken devices now and the Cydia store app is included in the process.
I just moved into a new house and the lawn needed to be mowed and all that, so one of my roommates made a deal with the neighbor and his kids came over to do the lawn. I went out to see if they needed anything, and I got talking with one of them. He asked me what I did and I told him I'm a programmer, and he asked me if I knew anything about jailbreaking iPods. I was completely and utterly flabergasted; I'd worked on jailbreaks back with the original iPhone and simply couldn't believe that a kid of maybe 9 or 10 in the middle of CT with non-techie parents actually knew about such things. Really speaks to how big jailbreaks and the like are these days.
Gaming. I had hacked my Sony PSP back when those were a new thing, and finding information on the process was tantamount to wading through half written forums posts from 10 year olds. Few people knew what they were talking about, it was often wrong or warned you about the wrong things, lots of people bricked their PSPs, but the prospect of free games lured in all the kids with no real income to try it. People who want jailbreaks for free games without knowing what it really entails.
Since iOS has become a huge gaming platform, it's no surprise that same PSP/NDS piracy consumer demographic has made the leap as well.
The Cydia Store is also a much smaller community, which means that your new application is almost guaranteed to be noticed if it brings something cool to the table.
The piracy rates are high, just as with anywhere, but you can still make very good money on the Cydia Store, from personal experience (http://kramerapps.com/cydia/).
iOS users continue to purchase more apps, and pay for more expensive apps, than their Android counterparts, despite the gulf in overall sales and user figures:
http://blog.flurry.com/bid/85911/App-Developers-Signal-Apple... "Running a comparison of revenue generated by top apps on both iOS and Android, Flurry calculates that the difference in revenue generated per active user is still 4 times greater on iOS than Android. For every $1.00 a developer earns on iOS, he can expect to earn about $0.24 on Android. These results mirror earlier findings from similar analysis Flurry conducted in Q4 of 2011 and Q1 of 2012."
OP remarked that iOS is no longer the major market for app store developers, implying that some other mobile platform is. If not Android, what else would it be?
