How many basic apps should one have in the app store before one has a reasonable expectation of getting a job as an iPhone developer?

I started working on apps around the end of 2009, by the end of 2010 I was a full time app developer building an app for a major book publisher.  I am now the director of mobile development for a startup, and I have almost no apps in the app store that are "mine", that I consider to be owned and run by me.  Where has the time gone?  this feels like it was just yesterday.  Here is my story so you can sort of see a possible path to achieve this goal.In 2009 I had spent 14 years prior in the video game industry and quite frankly I was getting sick of it.  But I loved working with artists and creating new things that had never been built before.  Having this gaming background when I started iOS development, I instantly latched on to animations and 3D transformations on CALayers that I did really see many other iOS developers digging into.  I didn't really want to continue to build games, so I built some demos and tried to elevate them to the level that I saw in the iOS framework APIs themselves.  Anyway the demos were all things that when I showed people back then they had no idea how I had create it.This got me a contract at a small game company where a moody programmer had quit at the last second before release.  I polished this app off and tried to make a name for myself as someone that could take any project, understand it, and rescue the day.  It worked.  Is my name on that app?  honestly I have no idea, but it's initial release is because of my work there.From here I built several enterprise apps for major car manufacturers.  These apps were internal to the car companies in various ways.  Some the public got to see with prototype cars that traveled around the world, and at car shows, and some were used internally by sales people.   One of these apps for the LA Auto Show was built in a week.  It was an incredible effort and I delivered a working app to them, with cars that could be spun 360 degrees for every make, model, color that they offered and all of the stats and details for every car.  I allotted a day for each screen in the app, and even that was ambitious for what each screen did.Before I knew it, I was at the book publisher in New York City, living in a hotel for 3 months.  There they eventually decided they wanted to pursue their own platform rather than finish off the rather amazing, and very close to completed, kids animated book reader app for iOS that I was working on for over a year.  It still baffles me why they would throw away this stuff that was looking so cool.  I think time proved out which direction they should have gone.By this time, it's several years of app development with barely a single app that I could show to someone wanting to hire me.Next I applied some of what I learned working on the book reader to create a youtube channel video viewer and comic reader for a video game company.Then there were apps for WWE and E online.  I'd call E online, the bottom of the barrel since I hate having to helped deliver more crap about Kim Kardashian to the world.  :-)Anyway, my point is, if you have the capabilities to show people that you can make nice looking apps quickly, or show that you can help them understand their app and help them get out a hole they might be stuck in, then you should have very little to prevent you from getting an app developer job.  My main other criteria for candidates I look for is to know that they aren't going to come in a make a total mess of the codebase I've built.  You should be able to create code that presents an API that is consistent with iOS APIs and popular frameworks that people use.My current position as director is because I was sent to Thync as a consultant and told to do whatever I needed to do to make their app work.  A few weeks in, myself and the people at Thync said how much we liked working for each other and how much I had helped them get a handle on the app development.  They hired me away from the consulting company and I was again working on technology that the world had never seen before, an app that uses a bluetooth device to play electrical waveforms into peoples heads to alter the way they feel, and that makes me quite happy.It's true that if you have a few apps in the store that are all your own, or if you have a github account that hosts some open source code I can look at, I can get a good sense of what you know and how well you know it.  But I don't think it's everything, since you could have copied someone else's code to get to that point.  I'd prefer to give you a programming test or ask you to present to me the details of using a particular API in an interview.Keep chasing whatever excites you most about app development.  Don't throw an attitude around when you are working on something less thrilling, just keep trying to help people achieve their own app goals, and you'll be where you want to be before you even realize what has happened.  Try to build code that you love using rather than just accomplishing an end result to a minimal viable product.