I think the best success story is from Fire Maple Games, and it’s The Lost City title. You can read the related guest post on the blog. Basically it boils down to putting a really lot of very hard work for a long time to make a high quality product that fills a big gaping hole in the genre (lack of quality adventures on iOS), and then using previously popular product ( The Secret of Grizly Manor game) as a free advertising vehicle.
Please note that I think all 3 elements are crucial for success: a) great quality product, b) lack of competition in category, c) way to mass-market it.
I myself didn’t find any financial success, although last game I published (SpinUp) has received a lot of media attention, fantastic reviews and was featured by Apple. If you want honest figures, the game gained about $3000, almost all of it in the week it was at iTunes front page. Once the game got off the front page, sales virtually stopped.
The only real push to sales was featuring on iTunes. Great reviews on popular websites such as Kotaku and SlideToPlay didn’t reflect on sales at all.
There are a lot of possible ways to go about making living on AppStore, but I think the only thing one can really plan for is to build a catalog of many apps and live off their long trail.
It helps if apps are designed for mainstream audience (family-friendly), and even more if they fill a particular niche. Looks like children apps are currently doing better than generic games, meaning you can charge more money and expect to have steadier sales. Not to say that usually these apps require WAAAAY less production time than a mainstream game. If that’s your cup of tea ( it’s not mine though), I would say this is the best way to make some steady income.
If you make products for more specialized markets (ie. professional tools) you can expect even more stable market.
My $0.02 
Cheers
Nenad
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