[jvickers]

Swift is going to help iOS apps improve in quality and quantity - though some very bad quality Objective-C apps that would have been rejected into the store would be bad quality apps that are accepted into the store.

Your problem may be to do with using the App Store as the sales and advertising platform. If people find out about the app through the other means and purchase it in the app store, you don't have such a problem with your lack of visibility in the store.

I think there is a future for using apps as a mobile optimized interface for an online service, where there are other sales channels apart from the App Store.

When it comes to product discovery, people find out about products on the web at all sorts of times when they are not particularly browsing for an app. It helps if there is a decent web presence for them to see what the app does, and possibly use it in a web browser.