Graphics & Design's Negative Review Share Fell From 33.1% to 22.5% in Six Months

Design tools have a rough reputation with reviewers. Crashes on export, subscriptions that feel steep for a filter pack, features locked behind a paywall halfway through a project - it is a category that tends to collect one-star complaints. So when the negative share moves, it is worth writing down exactly when and by how much, before the number quietly stops meaning what it once meant.

As of 9 September 2026, Appeye's tracking of the Graphics & Design category showed the share of negative reviews falling from 33.1% in February 2026 to 22.5% in July 2026 - a drop of 10.6 percentage points over six months, drawn from 10,335 reviews across the period.

Month by month, the path was not a straight line but it leaned steadily downward: 33.1% negative in February, 32.4% in March, 31.5% in April, then a bigger step down to 26.3% in May, a small rise back to 28.0% in June, and 22.5% in July.

4 of 5monthly moves in the improving direction

That June rise matters. Of the five month-to-month moves in this window, four went in the improving direction and one did not - negative share climbed from 26.3% to 28.0% before falling again the following month. A category can be genuinely improving over six months and still have a month that looks like a step backward inside it.

One month bucked the trend entirely: negative share rose from 26.3% to 28.0% in June before falling again in July.

Part of the story here is scale, not just sentiment. Review volume nearly quintupled over the same window, from 683 reviews in February to 3,339 in July. That growth doesn't invalidate the trend - the negative share is still a percentage, not a raw count - but it does mean July's 22.5% and February's 33.1% are being measured against very different sample sizes, and a category picking up that much new review activity is worth watching for how the mix holds up as it keeps growing.

What this finding does not say is that every app in the category got better, or that the improvement will continue in a straight line into August and beyond. It is a catalogue-wide average across however many Graphics & Design apps Appeye tracked in this window, measured once, on 9 September 2026. A single app in the category could be moving the opposite way and still be sitting inside a category-wide improvement like this one.

Review volume in the category nearly quintupled over the same window, from 683 reviews in February to 3,339 in July.