OpenAI Dev Day: ChatGPT targets the app store model
Original: OpenAI’s latest features take direct aim at the app store model
Why This Matters
If ChatGPT becomes a primary app discovery layer, it reshapes how developers reach users at massive scale.
At its Dev Day on September 29, OpenAI unveiled features designed to make ChatGPT a hub for app discovery and usage. With 1.2 billion weekly users, the platform now supports in-chat app suggestions, interactive extensions, and a 'Sign in with ChatGPT' system letting users carry their AI allowance into third-party apps.
OpenAI's Dev Day on Tuesday introduced a cluster of features that, taken together, sketch a clear challenge to conventional app stores. ChatGPT will now surface app suggestions mid-conversation when it detects a tool could help the user complete a task. Users can connect that app and use it without leaving the chat interface.
Underpinning this is an expanded plugin architecture that supports 'extensions' — interactive panels where developers can embed their tools directly inside ChatGPT. Apps that previously lived on the web or a native mobile client can now run as AI-native versions inside the chatbot itself.
The third pillar is 'Sign in with ChatGPT,' which lets users authenticate to third-party services using their OpenAI identity and apply their existing AI usage allowance there. OpenAI launched with 16 partners including Cognition's Devin, Notion, Vercel, and Figma. A live demo showed an internal meeting app surfacing calendar events inside ChatGPT, with AI-generated notes and follow-up summaries delivered at the end of the call.
OpenAI has tried variations of in-chat apps before — plugins launched in 2023 and were quietly rolled back — but this iteration is more integrated and structurally coherent. For developers, ChatGPT's scale makes it a distribution channel that is increasingly hard to ignore. The announcements came alongside the introduction of 'Dots,' OpenAI's new agentic assistants, and new underlying AI models.