I hadn't read that STFU piece before, but it is truly awful. It basically argues "Don't talk about your success because you'll give away your secrets and increase competition, lower the barrier for competitors." One presumes this goes double for actual code: don't open-source! You'll give away all your secrets!
It's that kind of selfish, greedy outlook that makes life suck. Jealously guarded secrets retard the growth of industries - and presumably, if you really care about your customers, and you're building good stuff, then you want more good stuff in the world. Of course it sucks if you get undercut, or your product gets cloned. And you can't rely on your market to know the history and do the right thing.
The saving grace, and why Matthieu's post is horse shit, is that software is a lot like art. People don't want clones. They want Plants vs. Zombies not a clone. It's music, it's art, and guarding your secrets about how you make your art is unhealthy.
One of the things you get, too, is influence and respect from your peers. Pierre certainly has mine. He's put together an excellent resource for those who want to follow in his footstep writing and selling apps having realistic expectations about what it takes, and some great links to resources for doing things like promotion. It's still a lot of hard work, clearly, but he's increasing the size of his community, not giving away the secret sauce.
"Don't talk about your success because you'll give away your secrets and increase competition, lower the barrier for competitors."
This is the truth. I know I've gotten ideas from posters like the OP talking about how profitable an app is. If I have a bigger team or more resources, I could take away your customers pretty quickly.
"Jealously guarded secrets retard the growth of industries"
Really? Rather than everyone using the exact same idea/code base and branching off from it, we have completely different products. It helps the growth of industries and ends up being better for the consumer (more choices, etc).
"They want Plants vs. Zombies not a clone. It's music, it's art, and guarding your secrets about how you make your art is unhealthy."
Don't blame anyone when you can't make any money because you gave all of your best stuff away for free.
Making money from the app store (or any startup) is hard enough as it is.
Do you really want to take a chance and give away any competitive advantage that you may have had?
Do you realize that the exact same argument can be made against honesty in government? "If you're honest, look at all the money in bribes you're giving up! Everyone does it, it's almost impossible to get caught and even if you do, it's a slap on the wrist. It's stupid to not take bribes."
And sure enough, everyone starts taking bribes. The corruption spreads to every level of government, because every individual makes the same calculation: take the bribe, more money for the family, don't take the bribe, less money.
When I began doing apps, I was inspired and motivated by such posts. They gave me the motivation to try and do it. So I thought I could give back. I did the same post last year, and I'm sure I have new competitors because of this post but that's OK for me. I'm here to build great apps and competition is very good for that !
The designer of IBM's Harvard Mark I said, "Don't worry about people trying to steal your ideas, if they're original, you will have to ram them down people's throats". I have had some minor success in Android apps ($30 a day), but I do not worry much about competition from giving advice for how people can make their apps more popular. Even if the competition is in my domain - I have an educational app too, but only for math - I do not see a spelling educational app as competition. It makes Android a healthy ecosystem - when Android had a smaller market share, I was more scared of iOS or possibly Windows Mobile overshadowing Android then I was over other Android developers. Also, a lot of this advice has been given by others already, including Google sometimes. Have a good, simple, relevant app icon. Have a descriptive app name. Have the app work for devices with different sizes and different densities. And so on. It sounds logical, but I see many people with low download numbers who do not follow this advice.
I started doing an Android spreadsheet which could handle Excel. I got XLS files working, but more modern XLSX files were tougher. I hit a brick wall and saw it would take, at a minimum, months of work, maybe even more than a year. So I open sourced what I had (a bare bones spreadsheet which could handle XLS), announced its existence and moved on. You would think I might have gotten some interest - a spreadsheet which can handle XLS, and with some work, XLSX. But I did not. As Paul Graham said in his essay on Viaweb, it was "running up a stairwell". The number of people who know Java is a certain size, the number who know the Android API are smaller, and the number with the skills to work on this advanced problem is quite small. I am sure if ABS author and Square employee Jake Wharton wanted to help me on it it could get done, as he is an expert Android programmer. But he is too busy building up Square and maintaining ABS and his other projects. If you choose a difficult task, you do not have to worry about competition in the way you do with low hanging fruit. I myself have had some success with more easibly attainable goals on Android to where I don't know if I myself would have the time to work on that spreadsheet nowadays, even with a capable partner. There are too many sure things that would generate money with a few weeks of work to devote time to a big project like that. Maybe when my apps generate even more revenue, and competition crowds out all the low hanging fruit will I go back to a more ambitious project like that. Worry about competition? It is as sure a guaranteed money maker as there can be with a few months of expert work, sitting on Github and interest is minimal.
Now I have learned a trick or two to get my apps noticed that I do not share with people, but 99% of what I know I can share with little fear. It requires some domain knowledge and some work, and those 2 things are a big enough barrier to get people from doing what I talk about any way.
Having said that, every time I read one of these types of success stories I'm reminded of Jacques Matthieu's "So you're making good money. STFU" post. http://jacquesmattheij.com/So+you+are+making+good+money+now+...