Photography Apps Are Split in Two: 68.9% Five-Star, 14.8% One-Star

Photography is one of the biggest categories in the catalogue, and as of 22 September 2026 it held 1,338 apps with enough reviews to measure. Looked at as a whole, it reads like a success story: 68.9% of all reviews were five stars, and another 8.3% were four stars. Put those together and 77.2% of reviews were positive. That is a strong number for any category to carry.

But the same 1,338 apps also carried a 18.2% negative share — the combined weight of 1-star and 2-star reviews — against a catalogue-wide average negative share of 10.5% on the same date. That is not a small gap. Photography's negative share ran 7.7 percentage points above the average app in Appeye's catalogue, which in relative terms means users in this category were roughly 1.7 times as likely to leave a 1 or 2 star review as the average app owner would expect.

Photography's negative share ran 7.7 percentage points above the average app in the catalogue — roughly 1.7 times the expected rate.

What makes the 18.2% figure unusual isn't just its size, it's its shape. Of that negative share, 14.8 points came from 1-star reviews alone, and only 3.4 points from 2-star. Compare that to the 4.6% of reviews sitting at 3 stars — the neutral middle — and the category looks less like a spread of opinion and more like two separate audiences voting on two separate apps. Very few Photography users landed in the middle; they either loved the app or actively disliked it.

That distinction matters for how you read the finding. A high negative share can mean an app is mediocre — a lot of 2s and 3s, users mildly let down. That is not what's happening here. In Photography, the 1-star rate (14.8%) is more than four times the 2-star rate (3.4%), and the neutral 3-star slice (4.6%) is the smallest of the five bands. This is a category where the reviews are polarized rather than lukewarm: strong five-star loyalty sitting alongside a smaller but vocal block of outright rejection, with very little in between.

The 1-star rate was more than four times the 2-star rate, with the smallest slice of all sitting at 3 stars.

For anyone tracking a Photography app, the number to watch isn't the 68.9% five-star headline — that was already true and will keep looking healthy on a dashboard. It's the 18.2% negative share sitting quietly underneath it, measured on 22 September 2026 across the category's 1,338 apps, that tells you where the real risk sits.

4.6%of reviews landed at 3 stars — the smallest of all five bands