I wonder if Flower Garden is an anomaly or if there are quite a few indie developers that Apple's money machine has "freed"?

Would be interesting if everyone was as transparent as Noel...

I'm pretty sure Flower Garden is definitely an anomaly. It falls in that category of not being a super-hit, but not being a flop either.

Check out some of the other sales figures by Nimblebit http://nimblebit.com for games that did much better.

What's the point? It only attracts more competition. It's nice to be public when you can sell to your readers (hello Joel), but otherwise there is little direct gain in disclosure.

I think you gain more publicity than competition (especially if it's not something that can be ripped off in a weekend).

Besides, to me it's more important to share data with other developers so it's worth it for me personally, even if financially it's just a wash. Not everything is about money :-)

If you write about your app and release the numbers, you will get linked to from all sorts of places. So not just your regular users, but you will get new ones from people who don't normally follow you.

Mostly software engineers though - people notorious for not buying software. Pagerank is the only benefit you can get from it.