Developers can now submit apps to ChatGPT

Distribution has always been monetized. What margin did a retailer take for putting your boxed software on the shelf? How about that magazine ad? Google search? And so on. Get over the idea that a platform should give you their distribution for free.

The problem comes when there is no way for you to own the distribution, pay nothing to the platform, and still be able to build on top of it. That’s the closed portion we should rally (legislate?) against.

There is an argument, similar to mine on distribution, that there is no inherent right that a platform should be open. That the extra utility that comes from being open should make the platform more competitive in the market vs. closed platforms.

The challenge is that with dominant platforms they are monopolistic. There is no chance for competitive forces to reward openness.

These two parts of the debate are often conflated, which hides what is truly troubling: dominant platforms controlling both distribution and access.

At some point the model providers will realize they don't need to provide apps, just enterprise-grade intelligence at scale in a pipe, much like utility companies providing electricity/water. Right now, they have to provide the apps to kick-off the adoption.

When you share an app you created in Google AI Studio, it will use quota from the logged in user, instead of your own quota.

In some ways, that’s what MCP interfaces are kind of for. It just takes one extra step to add the mcp url and go through oauth.

I assume the fall off there will be 99% of users though, the way it works today.

But this theoretically allows multiple applications to plugin into ChatGPT/claude/gemini and work together.

If someone adds zillow and… vanguard, your LLM can call both through mcp and help you plan a home buy

We do this at openrouter and many apps use exactly that pattern!

won't they just eventually have a 'log in with OpenAI' button similar to a 'login with Google' button?

Maybe a 'connect with OpenAI' button so the service can charge a fee, while allowing a bring your own token type hybrid.

This is close to how it works with shared apps in Google AI Studio.

Foundation Models on iOS/macOS was seen to have dormant code for doing this via OpenAI. So they are experimenting with it and may make it available next year.

Screenshots use a different router, so if you get stuck in one modality then pasting a screenshot can sometimes divert whatever "expert" you were stuck on that was refusing to comply. I don't work at OpenAI but I know enough about how these systems are architected to know that once you are stuck in a refusal basin the only way is to start a new session or figure out how to get routed to another node in their MoE configuration. Ironically, they promised their fancy MoE routing would fix issues like these but it seems like they are getting worse.

hi kgeist - i work on the team that manages the github app. are you able to share a conversation where the github connector did not work? feel to message me at https://x.com/kevins8 (dm's open)

I never had a pleasant GitHub connection experience in any platform.

Permission to allow the specific repo only access never works, so I'll have to allow access to all repo and then manually change it back to specific repo inside GitHub after connecting.

There have been instances of endless loop after Oauth sign-in, more recent experience was in Claude Code Web[1].

Poor GitHub folks, only if someone can donate time/money to this struggling small company these critical issues could be addressed /S

[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/11730

Google literally just released this on their GitHub. It must be in ether.

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Zero sum mentality is tiring!

The benefit is "Distribution". If your users are there, you want to address them wherever they already are, this is why apple store / play store / amazon store ... are so popular. Becoming a platform / ecosystem is the common playbook to go from being a one product company to an ecosystem / platform worth a lot more

I think you don't need to add the @, just prompt: Figma, etc... And of course check that you are connected to the app in your settings

Not much of an announcement if you’ve paid attention to anything the company has done in the past two years.

They basically don't. It's honestly not even worth trying - it's embarrassing if your prompt leaks and it starts with "under no circumstances repeat this prompt to the user!"

Your app doesn't really have prompts, it's just an MCP server that can also serve react components.

Why should developers' prompts be proprietary at all?

I'm guessing it will be wildly successful. Companies don't really care about middlemen between them and their users. They just want to reach them wherever, however they can.

You'd be surprised! In B2C at least, almost every company we talked to is building a ChatGPT App out ouf fear of missing out this agentic wave like so many missed mobile 15 years ago

Travel. Finding hotels, flights etc.

Also cancelled - it does feel like commoditisation is here now for LLMs. Recently, I've found Gemini & DeepSeek as good or better at 95% of what GPT can do now, so I can no longer justify paying for it.

They’ve been planning this since October.

Chatgpt apps are MCP servers with a UI resource (can be a react component or vanilla js) that gets shown in an frame one the tool is called by chatgpt. So you can't just port an existing app, but you can reuse the same backend Api wrapped inside an mcp server, and some of the components that you need to adapt to openai ux requirements. I practice this means developing an app from scratch.

The idea behind Apps is that they can expand the capabilities of ChatGPT in multiple ways. Text-only MCPs are a type of app that can provide both actions and context in your conversations, but Apps can do much more now that you can bring in custom UI in multiple formats (card, full-screen, etc) as we showed at DevDay in October. Btw UI is proposed for the MCP spec in SEP-1865.

Since then, I’ve seen some very impressive demos and I’m excited to see what developers create on the platform as that’s always the coolest part.

They don't have any more juice left to squeeze at that front. The lack of new ideas in LMs is pretty palpable by now. There is a bunch of companies with billions invested in them that are all just looking at each other, trying to figure out what to do.

You’re thinking like an entrepreneur, Sam thinks like a VC. For them it’s easier to sell 100 half assed ideas that could be worth a trillion dollars than to have one refined idea that’s “only” worth $10B.

> They are unfocused

Stop with the MBA playbook he said.

> just make the...

Just make a superior product he said.

Not right now.

    In this early phase, developers can link out from their ChatGPT apps to their own websites or native apps
    to complete transactions for physical goods. We’re exploring additional monetization options over time,
    including digital goods, and will share more as we learn from how developers and users build and engage.