The focus of OpenAI’s Dev Day on Tuesday may have been on its agentic assistants known as Dots, or its new AI models, but combined, the AI company’s announcements pointed towards a bigger plan: a disruption of the traditional app store model. Taken together, today’s announcements turn ChatGPT itself into the place where software can be discovered, launched, and used by people and agents alike. In addition, OpenAI introduced a way for people to bring their ChatGPT identity with them, while also allowing them to use their existing AI allowance in third-party apps.
This isn’t the first time OpenAI has experimented with how apps could operate within its familiar chatbot interface, but the current vision feels more fleshed out than before. For starters, the comapny is turning ChatGPT itself into a surface for launching apps. The chatbot, which the company says now has 1.2 billion weekly users, has yet to fully capitalize on its potential as a discovery mechanism for finding and using apps that work with AI.
To change that, ChatGPT will begin to make app suggestions within the flow of conversation when it recognizes that a particular app could help the user complete their task. From there, the user will be able to connect the app and begin using it directly within ChatGPT. This is also aided by the expansion of ChatGPT’s plugin architecture, which now supports extensions.
This allows app developers to build interactive panels where users can work with their tools while they’re chatting with ChatGPT. This essentially turns the apps and services that users would have previously used via the web or through a native desktop or mobile app into something that’s operated directly within ChatGPT. Developers that sign on with the system can build AI-native versions of their apps through ChatGPT, the same way they would through the open web or a mobile app store.
As more and more discovery happens through AI chat, it’s a distribution channel that’s hard to pass up. Users get an incentive to use that channel too, because “Sign in with ChatGPT” will let them bring their AI allowance with them. (OpenAI has 16 launch partners on this effort, including Cognition’s Devin, Notion, Vercel, T3, OpenClaw, and Dactyl, but plans to add more soon, it says.) In a demo at OpenAI’s Dev Day event, the company showed off how its own new meeting app could work inside ChatGPT, showing upcoming meetings from the user’s calendar. Here, the user could easily choose to use AI to take meeting notes, then receive a summary of follow-up items when the meeting wrapped.
In another example, users would work with design-focused apps like those from Figma and Adobe to work on revisions of their current project or use a particular feature that would have otherwise required a standalone app. The apps can be shared with others, like work colleagues, in the lightweight websites ChatGPT now produces. From these ChatGPT sites, a user’s coworkers could sign in to the app with their own credentials and permissions, making the software experience personalized to them.
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