Six years, 2M+ downloads and $1M+ in App Store revenue — from a developer whose 2026 strategy shifted from shipping many small apps to protecting one Apple account
2M+ downloads · sixth consecutive year building apps (founder-reported)
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Adam Lyttle is in his sixth consecutive year building apps on the App Store. He reports over 2 million downloads and over $1 million in App Store revenue across that time. He is not describing a launch; he is describing what changed underneath a working business — and in the past nine months, he says, he has seen more change, more disruption and more accounts banned than ever before. Three things are happening simultaneously, in his framing. Apple cares far more about your account than developers realise. Blindly following keyword trends is the fastest way to get terminated. And even when you do everything correctly, some keywords simply will not rank any more, even when the data says they should. His diagnostic anecdote is instructive. Developers repeatedly contact him convinced their accounts are shadowbanned — that their apps just do not appear. Every time he looks at the portfolio he sees the same thing: copies of his own apps, copies of other developers' apps, and not a single original idea anywhere. His response is blunt: don't do this, and it matters more now than ever. What used to work no longer does. A year ago you could launch a new app from a new account and get an instant boost of hundreds of downloads within a day. That organic visibility is mostly gone now, especially for new accounts and risky niches. It takes longer to build trust with Apple — not just for an app, but at the account level. So he changed strategy: away from testing lots of small apps and small ideas, toward building apps that could get featured.
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Create free accountEmail code only. No password.Data credibility: Founder-reported, from a developer with six years of visible history in the indie iOS community. Adam Lyttle states over 2 million downloads and over $1 million in App Store revenue across his portfolio; no dashboard, payout statement or per-app breakdown appears in the transcript, so nothing is broken down and nothing has been extrapolated. The two named apps and their outcomes — Piano Run being featured at the iOS 26 launch with a subsequent portfolio-wide ranking uptick, and Draw Pop never ranking for 'AI art' (difficulty 51) or 'AI art generator' (49) since its April 2025 launch — are his own first-hand accounts. The account-termination wave around the Nano Banana keyword is reported second-hand: developers contacted him, and he relays that some were obvious bad actors while others used the keyword only in the keywords field and were still terminated. His claim that Apple can throttle visibility for an entire keyword search is his inference from his own and others' results, not a documented Apple policy. Directionally consistent with what the wider indie iOS community reported through 2025-2026, but unaudited.