OpenAI’s latest features take direct aim at the app store model

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 company 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.

OpenAI also talked about improvements to how developers submit plugins for review — OpenAI’s version of Apple’s App Review process, if you will. Now, developers will be able to track their review, see what needs to be fixed, request a human review, and update their plugin’s tools without starting their whole submission over.

The company also announced a new enterprise app marketplace where partners can market their services. At launch, there are some 30-plus partners offering their app through the OpenAI Marketplace, including Adobe, Figma, Sierra, Decagon, HubSpot, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Harvey, Legora, Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, Baseten, and others. Eligible customers can apply part of their OpenAI commitment toward approved partner software, OpenAI said.

Beyond turning ChatGPT into an app discovery tool where users connect with apps directly, OpenAI’s embrace of agents is gently pushing users into a new era where they don’t have to think as much about which app to use or why, relying instead on their AI agents’ suggestions.

With the launch of its autonomous AI agents known as Dots, agents will navigate the web for you, executing the tasks that need to be done in their own cloud infrastructure. Each Dot has its own cloud computer and browser, and can also use connected apps. Compare this to the old model, where users who wanted to manage some type of project — like building a website or coordinating a meeting calendar — would have to download different apps to their computer or phone to make that happen.

Now, users will instead tell an AI agent what they want to have done, and it will simply do it for them. In some cases, the agent’s work may require access to another AI model or a particular application. But this is something the agent may bring to the user, rather than the other way around — where the user is the one to go out and seek the particular tool for the job.

As OpenAI explains, the Dots will be able to connect to its ecosystem of now over 4,000 apps.

What’s more, the Dots can be proactive, perhaps jumping in to offer help with a project or bug, or handling a task the user forgot — but all done with the user’s approval. The Dots will perform what OpenAI calls “proactive research” in the background using connected apps in a read-only mode, but users would still have control over the actions they take.

This system could give app makers another way to reach customers outside of Apple and Google’s app stores. For instance, users could subscribe to a service through the app maker’s website, then connect that account to ChatGPT or Codex for their agent to use. OpenAI has not said, however, that these features would eliminate the need for separate third-party subscriptions or other charges.

Notably, OpenAI didn’t tease any plans on this front today, instead focusing on how it’s building the discovery, distribution, and interface pieces to counter the app store model, along with an identity layer and a mechanism for sharing a user’s existing ChatGPT AI allowance. It did not announce plans Tuesday for a billing or revenue-sharing system that’s comparable to the economic layer of traditional app stores.