Apple froze his account, revenue dropped 75% — the comeback: 30 apps mass-produced into $60,000/month

Dollar amounts below are paired with rough yen equivalents converted at 1 USD = 150 JPY.

The year everything broke at once

The hardships you usually hear about in indie development stories are along the lines of “revenue isn’t growing.” Viktor Seraleev’s 2022 was a different category of problem. 75% of his revenue vanished overnight, his Apple developer account was suspended, and his company’s bank account was frozen, all three, at the same time.

He sued Apple and lost. The conclusion was that suspending the account fell within Apple’s contractual rights. He describes that period as one of the most stressful and painful stretches of his life.

From that state, his current operation has grown to 30+ apps, generating over $60,100/month after Apple’s fees (roughly ¥9M/month). What matters here is not how fast the comeback was but how he rebuilt the shape of his business after it broke.

What happened, in order

He restarted his business three times: 2020, mid-2021, and 2022. The first two were self-initiated resets; only the third was forced from outside.

What the business looks like now

The current portfolio has 30+ apps, leaning toward photo/video, creative tools, and utilities. Revenue is entirely subscription-based (weekly and annual plans), and he doesn’t run in-app ads, a deliberate policy choice to preserve user trust.

Implementation is mostly native iOS Swift. Recently he’s begun exploring cross-platform work with React Native and Kotlin Multiplatform.

He ranks his acquisition channels by effectiveness himself.

Over a third of traffic comes from App Store search and competitor-page exposure combined, meaning it’s self-contained within the store. That fact ties directly to the risk discussed later.

The turning point was abandoning the “bet on one hit” approach

The turning point in this story is less the external disaster itself than the change in methodology he chose afterward.

Before the freeze, he operated by betting on a single app. And it actually worked once: his first solo app generated $34,000 in net revenue within 8 months and sold for $410,000. As a proof of success, that was more than enough.

But after everything collapsed simultaneously in 2022, what he adopted was a “build 10 apps” rule. Three rules: don’t compromise on quality, build genuinely useful features, and finish the number you committed to, no matter what.

Viewed as before/after: previously, he bet everything on one app and got a $410,000 lump sum (but risked losing it all), versus now, 30+ apps combine to generate $60,100/month. A simple average puts each app at around $2,000/month, no single standout app carries the business.

What this rule produced, beyond a count of apps, was decision-making material. Finishing 10 apps lets you see, empirically, which to grow, which to shut down, and where to put effort. Build only one, and you can never actually distinguish whether its failure to grow was a bad idea or bad execution.

Why this model worked

Reason one: the cost per failure went down. Under an all-in-on-one-app model, losing that bet becomes a loss for the entire business. Under a small-and-many model, one miss only costs 1/30th of the total. The 2022 experience was, for him, a firsthand proof that “depending on a single point will eventually get wiped out by an external factor.” Building a portfolio is the direct countermeasure.

Reason two: ASO was a repeatable entry point he already had. With ~25% of traffic from in-app search and ~10% from competitor pages, this structure gets stronger as the number of apps increases. Design each app’s name and keywords deliberately, and the search net widens in proportion to the app count. Unlike virality or media coverage, ASO scales roughly linearly with the number of apps launched. Mass production and ASO only work as a pair.

Reason three: switching from one-time purchase to subscription. If he sold 30 small apps as one-time purchases, revenue would restart from zero every month. By making them weekly/annual subscriptions, adding apps directly compounds into MRR. This is the precondition that makes the portfolio model work at all.

Reason four: going public built trust. After the freeze, he shifted his posture from “chaos and restarting” to “stability, predictability, transparency,” and began publicly sharing progress on X. Those 600K+ views are the product of that shift. In his own words, openness gathers more trust than a polished appearance.

The risk that hasn’t gone away

Even with recovered numbers, the structural problem hasn’t been solved.

The biggest dependency is still Apple. Revenue is reported after fees, and over a third of traffic is self-contained within the App Store. What stopped him in 2022 was a platform’s own decision, not the market or a competitor. Building more apps doesn’t make that risk of the same decision happening again disappear. He understands this better than anyone, which is precisely why his next move is Type.link (a link-in-bio and site builder), a Web/SaaS product with the clear intent of building footing outside the app stores.

Mass production has a time-cost ceiling. Posting 6 short videos a day for a month generated results, his best post hit 1.2M views, but he himself categorizes it as low-efficiency because it “takes too much time.” Apple Search Ads was also shut down because rising competition broke the unit economics. The clear split between what worked and what didn’t reflects just how much he’s tested.

What transfers, and what doesn’t

What transfers. The principle of “don’t bet on one app.” Deciding the count up front and forcing yourself to finish it (which functions as a mechanism for completing validation). Charging subscription rather than one-time, converting app count directly into revenue growth. Making ASO the primary channel, designing names and keywords to match from the start. And actively working to reduce single-platform dependency.

What doesn’t transfer. The capital from selling his first app for $410,000, and the breathing room that gave him. The development speed needed to sustain 30+ apps, and nearly a decade of accumulated trial and error. His relocation and the sanctions he faced due to geopolitics aren’t conditions anyone would want to replicate, but they’re inseparable from the backdrop to his decisions. He also cites his upbringing’s “never give up” ethic and family support as factors, neither of which is something someone else can procure.

The lesson here is not that a single hit is bad. The point is narrower: a single hit carries the property that when it disappears, the whole business disappears with it.

Related reading

• 24 books on Kindle — a mass-production case that built revenue by stacking up titles rather than chasing a single bestseller
• The VBA tool sold on Microns — a case showing that even a single, small product can attract a buyer