A Look Inside ChatGPT’s New ‘App Store’

Earlier this year, OpenAI announced ChatGPT apps. Not the ChatGPT app, mind you: That’s been out for more than a couple years now. ChatGPT apps, on the other hand, are programs that work within ChatGPT. You can access them in any given conversation with ChatGPT—in fact, they may appear based on the context of the conversation.

These aren’t necessarily apps that OpenAI builds itself, either; rather, you’ll find options here based on apps you may use yourself. The initial batch of apps included with the feature’s rollout included Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, Spotify, and Zillow—big apps you’ve likely used before.

While in a conversation with ChatGPT, you could ask the bot to help you book a flight to Paris via Expedia, find a particular listing through Zillow, or create a slide for a presentation with Canva. From OpenAI’s perspective, this adds a host of additional functionality to ChatGPT the company couldn’t offer itself. OpenAI doesn’t need to build an apartment-hunting tool into ChatGPT; it can just pull in Zillow. It also doesn’t escape me that the more apps that OpenAI folds into ChatGPT, the less likely it is you’ll need to leave ChatGPT to do something in another app—but that’s none of my business.

ChatGPT’s “app store” isn’t really a store

Speaking of more apps, the company plans to expand these apps overtime, as developers create ChatGPT-compatible extensions for their programs. That was part of yesterday’s news: OpenAI is now letting developers submit apps to ChatGPT en masse. What’s more, these apps will be hosted in an “app directory,” though many online are taking to calling it an app store. (There’s no payment necessary, however, so app directory might really be a more apt description.) You’ll find this new app directory in the sidebar of ChatGPT, appropriately called “Apps.”

Apps is apparently in beta, according to a label affixed to its title in ChatGPT. Here, you’ll find a rotating slide featuring an ad for some of the service’s biggest apps, like Canva and Zillow, and, below it, rows of apps to choose from. Right now, the apps are sorted into “Featured,” “Lifestyle,” and “Productivity,” with no option that includes all the apps. (But they seem to be entirely split across Lifestyle and Productivity.) There are a lot of options here already. Some made headlines this week, like Photoshop and Apple Music, while others arrived more quietly, like Asana, Uber, and Target. It’s not just traditional apps like Zillow or Spotify that are getting the app treatment here, either. OpenAI is also considering “connector” services, like Google Drive, as “apps.”