An Inside Look at ChatGPT’s New App Store

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Earlier this year, OpenAI announced ChatGPT apps. Not the ChatGPT app itself, mind you: that’s been around for over two years . ChatGPT apps, on the other hand, are programs running inside ChatGPT. You can access them in any ChatGPT conversation—in fact, they can appear depending on the context of the conversation.

These aren’t necessarily apps developed by OpenAI itself; rather, you’ll find options based on apps you might already use. The initial list of apps included in this feature includes Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, Spotify, and Zillow—large apps you’ve likely already used.

While chatting with ChatGPT, you can ask the bot to help you book a flight to Paris through Expedia, find a specific listing on Zillow, or create a presentation slide using Canva. From OpenAI’s perspective, this adds a lot of additional functionality to ChatGPT that the company couldn’t offer on its own. OpenAI doesn’t need to integrate an apartment search tool into ChatGPT; it can simply integrate Zillow. It also doesn’t escape my attention that the more apps OpenAI integrates into ChatGPT, the less likely you’ll be to leave ChatGPT to do something in another app—but that’s not my concern.

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The ChatGPT “app store” isn’t actually an app store.

Source: Lifehacker

Speaking of new apps, the company plans to gradually expand their functionality as developers create ChatGPT-compatible extensions for their programs. This was announced yesterday: OpenAI now allows developers to bulk submit apps to ChatGPT . Furthermore, these apps will be hosted in an “app catalog,” although many online refer to it as an app store. (However, there’s no charge for this, so “app catalog” would be a more appropriate description.) This new app catalog can be found in the ChatGPT sidebar, and it’s called “Apps.”

According to the ChatGPT label, the “Apps” section is in beta. Here, you’ll find a rotating slide featuring ads for some of the service’s biggest apps, like Canva and Zillow, and below that, rows of apps to choose from. Currently, the apps are sorted into “Featured,” “Lifestyle,” and “Productivity” categories, with no option to include all apps. (But they appear to be completely divided into “Lifestyle” and “Productivity.”) There are already a variety of options available. Some made headlines this week, like Photoshop and Apple Music , while others have emerged more quietly, like Asana, Uber, and Target. It’s not just traditional apps like Zillow or Spotify that are becoming apps. OpenAI is also considering “connector” services like Google Drive as “apps.”

What do you think at the moment?

You can click on any app in the catalog to learn what it can do. For example, Slack lets you search messages and chats to summarize, create summaries, and create responses. You can check your tasks in Asana to create progress reports and status updates. Outlook lets you create talking points and generate follow-up actions based on your emails and calendar events. While each app has a brief description, you’ll need to click the link to see the full scope of each service.

Here’s a list of the apps I’m currently seeing. Please note that this may not be a complete list, especially since OpenAI continues to add new apps to its service:

  • Adobe Acrobat

  • Adobe Express

  • Adobe Photoshop

  • Sales agent

  • Yeah!

  • Airtable

  • AllTrails

  • Amplitude

  • Apple Music

  • Asana

  • Atlassian Rovo

  • Azure Boards

  • Base camp

  • Booking.com

  • Box

  • Canvas

  • Clay

  • Claudinar

  • Conductor

  • Coursera

  • Dalupa

  • DoorDash

  • Dropbox

  • Egnit

  • Expedition

  • Figma

  • GitLab issues

  • Google Drive

  • Help the scout

  • Hexagon

  • High level

  • Hugging face

  • Instacar

  • Intuit Credit Karma

  • Intuit Mailchimp

  • Intuit TurboTax

  • Khan Academy

  • Claviyo

  • Linear

  • Charming

  • LSEG

  • Monday.com

  • Morningstar

  • Netflix

  • Concept

  • OpenTable

  • Outlook Calendar

  • Outlook email

  • Peloton

  • Pipedrive

  • PitchBook

  • ramp

  • Reptile

  • SharePoint

  • Slack

  • Spotify

  • Stripe

  • Target

  • Teams

  • Teamwork.com

  • TheFork

  • Button

  • Tripadvisor

  • Uber

  • Uber Eats

  • Versailles

  • Zillow

  • Zooho

  • Zoho Desk

  • Zoom

If you’re an active ChatGPT user and frequently switch between it and any of the apps on this list, you might find something useful here. Perhaps programmers will find the integration with Hugging Face and Lovable useful, and Photoshop users will benefit from the AI-powered image editing tools it provides. But I still feel like this is more of a marketing ploy than anything else: I don’t need to connect my Slack to ChatGPT to generate reminders for me; I’m perfectly capable of replying to emails and managing my calendar, so there’s no need to connect Outlook or another email client to the bot. Perhaps a future update will convince me of the need to integrate generative AI into all aspects of my work and personal life, but for now, I’m still not convinced.

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