By CrazyLabs
Report updated May 7, 2026
Drawing Carnival
For casual mobile gamers seeking stress-relief through creative, sensory-driven coloring and art puzzles.
Drawing Carnival is an established games app that is free with in-app purchases. With a 4.6/5 rating from 223.6K reviews, it shows polarized user reception. Users particularly appreciate relaxing and calming gameplay loop provides a stress-relief outlet for users of all ages, though aggressive ad frequency interrupts the core drawing experience and forces frequent game restarts remains a common concern.
What is Drawing Carnival?
Drawing Carnival is a casual coloring and art puzzle game for iOS and Android that combines ASMR sensory elements with multi-style coloring tools.
Users hire the app for low-stakes, sensory-driven stress relief, using the coloring loop to fill short gaps in their daily schedule.
Current Momentum
v2.4 · 1mo ago
Maintenance- Shipped stability fixes in latest release.
- Maintains high-frequency ad-supported engagement loop.
Active Nemesis
Paint by Number Coloring Game
By Oakever Games
Other Rivals
Rating Pulse 🇺🇸
Recent User MoodAI-powered deep analysis surfacing high-signal insights. Still in beta, accuracy improves daily. For informational purposes only.
What makes this app unique?
What Does It Look Like?
How Is The App's Momentum Right Now?
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What Are The Key Features?
Combines spray paint, neon markers, gems, and glitter powder tools to complete four-part portrait puzzles
Sensory-focused coloring experience designed for stress relief
Diverse makeup kit palettes used to color and style images
How much does it cost?
- Free-to-play with ad support
- In-app purchases available
Ad-supported model utilizing high-frequency engagement loops to maximize inventory across a large user base.
Who Built It?
CrazyLabs
Providing casual gamers with satisfying, trend-driven simulation and puzzle experiences for quick entertainment.
Portfolio
13
Apps
Who is CrazyLabs?
CrazyLabs operates as a high-volume publisher specializing in the hyper-casual to hybrid-casual transition, leveraging a global network of 'CrazyHubs' to source and scale developer talent. Their moat is a decentralized publishing infrastructure that allows them to test and iterate on viral trends faster than centralized studios. The current strategic tension lies in balancing their aggressive ad-monetization model against increasing user churn and technical stability issues reported in recent major titles.
Who is CrazyLabs for?
- Casual mobile gamers
- Creative enthusiasts
- A significant segment interested in DIY
- Fashion
Portfolio momentum
Released 50 updates across the portfolio in the last 6 months with 95.8% of apps currently active, maintaining a high-frequency development cycle.
What other apps does CrazyLabs make?
What do users think recently?
High confidence · Latest 100 of 119 total reviews analyzed · Based on 119 reviews. Signal may be noisy.
How did the latest release land?
What is the recent mood?
Recent user voice shows a mixed sentiment. Users appreciate relaxing and calming gameplay loop provides a stress-relief outlet for users of all ages, but report aggressive ad frequency interrupts the core drawing experience and forces frequent game restarts.
What Users Love
What Frustrates Users
What Users Want
What is the competitive landscape for Drawing Carnival?
How's The Games Market?
How does it evolve in the Games market?
The app maintains a 4.72 rating on iOS with over 111,000 ratings, indicating strong initial appeal despite the mixed sentiment regarding ad frequency.
| Country | Category | Chart | Rank | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🇮🇱 Israel | Simulation | AndroidFree | #167 | ▲11 |
| 🇨🇦 Canada | Simulation | AndroidFree | #194 | NEW |
The rivals identified
The Nemesis
Head to Head
The target app must pivot toward a content-first strategy or double down on its unique ASMR-audio niche to prevent user churn to this high-velocity library.
What sets Drawing Carnival apart
Incorporates ASMR-focused audio feedback during the drawing process to enhance the relaxation experience
Combines sketch-and-color mechanics into a single flow rather than just static number-filling
What's Paint by Number Coloring Game's Edge
Maintains a significantly higher release cadence, ensuring the content library feels infinite to power users
Provides a more robust social ecosystem that encourages user-generated content and community engagement
Contenders
Features exclusive licensed content partnerships that provide unique, recognizable imagery for coloring
Optimized for long-term retention through complex, multi-layered coloring projects that take hours to complete
Provides advanced tools like color-by-area and magic wands to speed up the coloring process
Focuses on a clean, minimalist UI that emphasizes the artwork over gamified progression loops
Peers
Combines traditional jigsaw mechanics with artistic storytelling to create a more narrative-driven experience
Uses a unique 'live' art style where the image comes to life as the puzzle completes
Offers a 'mandala' and pattern-focused art style that appeals to a more mature, meditative audience
Provides a subscription-based 'Colorfy Plus' that removes all ads and unlocks unlimited color palettes
New Kids on the Block
Tap Color Pro: Color By Number
★4.6 (218.6K)Talefun
⚡Shows strong recent activity and is aggressively targeting the casual coloring market with rapid feature iteration.
Implements a 'daily challenge' streak system that gamifies daily logins more effectively than the target
Uses a simplified one-tap coloring mechanic that reduces friction for younger or casual users
The outtake for Drawing Carnival
Strengths to defend, gaps to attack
Core Strengths
- ASMR-focused audio feedback creates a unique sensory relaxation loop
- Multi-style puzzle mechanics sustain session length via varied asset interaction
Critical Frictions
- Ad-trigger instability causes progress loss on Android
- Misleading marketing creates high churn among new users
Growth Levers
- Expand content library to include pop-culture themes for replay value
- Implement non-intrusive rewarded ads to replace forced ad frequency
Market Threats
- Paint by Number content-first strategy drains long-term retention
- Rising user frustration with ad-monetization threatens app store rating baseline
What are the next best moves?
Audit ad-trigger logic because ad-induced crashes are the top complaint → reduce churn
Technical instability linked to ad triggers is the primary driver of negative sentiment.
Trade-off: Pause new content asset production for one sprint to focus on stability.
Update store creative to accurately reflect guided coloring because users report misleading marketing → improve conversion quality
Players express disappointment that the game does not allow independent drawing.
Trade-off: Deprioritize the planned social-sharing feature to reallocate design resources to store assets.
A counter-intuitive read
The app's high rating is a deceptive indicator of health, as the aggressive ad-monetization is creating a 'churn-and-burn' cycle that will eventually collapse the rating once the new-user funnel slows.
Feature Gaps vs Competitors
- Daily updated image library (available in Paint by Number but missing here)
- Social sharing feeds (available in Paint by Number but missing here)
Key Takeaways
The app successfully leverages ASMR-driven relaxation to build a large user base, but aggressive ad-monetization and technical instability are actively eroding the core experience, so the PM must prioritize stability and creative transparency to prevent churn to content-rich rivals.
Where Is It Heading?
Mixed Signals
The casual coloring market is consolidating around content-heavy rivals that offer daily updates and social features. Drawing Carnival remains exposed to churn because its current maintenance-mode updates fail to address the ad-monetization friction that drives negative sentiment.
Technical instability during ad triggers causes progress loss, which compounds the rating drag already visible on Android.
The core ASMR-coloring loop remains a high-retention hook for casual users seeking stress relief.