ChatGPT App Store - A Game Changer Or Hype?
Are you still using ChatGPT to compose emails, provide structure to your blog articles, research on topics, or fact-check information?
Well, those days are officially over.
At its annual developers event on Monday, OpenAI unveiled a feature that’s less “incremental update” and more “wait, ChatGPT is becoming an operating system?”
The company announced that ChatGPT users can now connect with third-party apps directly within the chatbot, turning it from a conversational AI into something that looks suspiciously like the next evolution of how we interact with digital services.
Want to create a weekend playlist? Ask ChatGPT, and it’ll tap into Spotify without you lifting a finger to switch apps.
Need a three-bedroom house in a specific neighborhood? ChatGPT will pull up Zillow listings faster than you can say “mortgage calculator.”
From Chatbot to Super Assistant
“We never meant to build a chatbot when we built ChatGPT,” confessed Nick Turley, who runs the ChatGPT team. “We set out to build a super assistant and we got a little sidetracked.”
Talk about an understatement. It’s like saying Uber got “a little sidetracked” from being a black car service, or that Instagram was “briefly” a photo-sharing app before becoming a shopping platform, dating hub, and existential crisis generator.
The new feature, available to logged-in ChatGPT users outside the EU across Free, Go, Plus and Pro plans, includes integrations with Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, Spotify, and Zillow.
OpenAI calls this capability “talking to apps,” which is perhaps the most straightforward name the company has ever given anything. Users need to sign in to these services the first time, after which ChatGPT can work its magic across platforms.
Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, sees enormous potential in this shift. “There’s an opportunity for builders to create entirely new applications that are even native to ChatGPT, and of course for services you love to be able to benefit there, too,” he said during Monday’s event.
By opening ChatGPT to third-party apps and payments, OpenAI is taking a major step toward transforming ChatGPT from a chatbot into a full-fledged AI operating system that combines conversational intelligence, rich interfaces, and embedded commerce.
Think of it as the App Store moment for AI, except instead of tapping icons, you’re just... talking.
The Stock Market’s New Kingmaker
Here’s where things get weird. When Sam Altman mentioned specific companies during the developer event, their stock prices jumped. Like, immediately. Figma, Expedia Group, and Booking Holdings all saw their shares pop after getting the ChatGPT seal of approval.
“This is a strange new thing that started happening,” Altman said during a press briefing, with the slightly bewildered tone of someone who just discovered they can accidentally move markets with their words. “We are trying to figure out how to adjust for this kind of world, but it’s weird.”
Weird indeed. The last person who could casually move stock prices just by mentioning companies was probably Elon Musk on Twitter, and look how well that turned out for everyone involved.
The Numbers Behind the Hype
Let’s talk scale for a moment, because the numbers here are genuinely bonkers.
Altman revealed that OpenAI now has more than 800 million weekly ChatGPT users. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly equivalent to the entire population of Europe checking in with ChatGPT every single week.
This astronomical growth has translated into serious revenue. In September, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said the company was on track to generate $13 billion in revenue this year, up from $4 billion in 2024. That’s a 225% increase in a single year—the kind of growth that makes venture capitalists lose sleep (the good kind of sleep-losing, apparently).
But here’s the catch: despite raking in billions, OpenAI remains unprofitable. The company burns through billions of dollars annually on computing costs, research expenses, and its recent spending spree on chips and data centers. It’s the Silicon Valley equivalent of making it rain while standing in a hurricane of expenses.
“Obviously, one day we have to be very profitable and we’re confident and patient that we will get there,” Altman said with the calm reassurance of someone spending money they don’t technically have yet. “But right now, we’re in a phase of investment and growth.”
They’re pulling a classic tech startup move—grow first, profit later, and hope the later part happens before the investors get nervous.
Beyond app integrations, OpenAI also released AgentKit, a software development kit designed to help developers build AI agents. AI agents are systems or programs capable of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of users or other systems by designing their workflow and utilizing available tools.
Think of agents as ChatGPT’s more proactive cousins—instead of waiting for you to ask questions, they go out and do things for you. In 2025, multi-agent collaboration is becoming more common, where multiple AI agents work together to execute complex, end-to-end tasks like inventory tracking and customer lifecycle management.
Companies like Albertsons, Box, and Canva have already built agents using OpenAI’s tools. “Software used to take years or months to build,” Altman noted. “It can take minutes now.”
Sure, and websites used to be built with <marquee> tags and geocities templates, but here we are. The real question isn’t how fast we can build things—it’s whether we should be building them at all. But that’s a philosophical debate for another article, preferably one written by humans while we still have jobs.
In a move that might surprise people familiar with OpenAI’s historically proprietary approach, the company announced that its foray into open-source models has generated 23 million downloads on Hugging Face.
The company also introduced smaller voice and image-generation models optimized for speed and lower costs, acknowledging that not everyone needs the computational equivalent of a Ferrari when a reliable Honda will do the job.
The Mystery Hardware Project
Adding star power to Monday’s event was Jony Ive, the legendary Apple designer responsible for making your iPhone look so pretty you forgive it for breaking every two years. Ive and Altman have teased an AI hardware collaboration, but details remain maddeningly vague.
Ive revealed that his team has generated about 15 to 20 “really compelling product ideas,” but deciding which ones to pursue has been challenging. “It would be easy if we knew there were three good ones,” he said. “It’s just not like that.”
This is designer-speak for “we have too many good ideas and executive dysfunction is real.” Given Ive’s track record, whatever eventually emerges will probably be beautiful, minimalist, and cost approximately one kidney.
ChatGPT as Your Digital Brain
According to Nick Turley, over the next six months, ChatGPT will evolve even further into something resembling an operating system where users can access more software and new services. Unlike OpenAI’s previous GPT Store, which was a separate app marketplace, this launch puts apps directly in ChatGPT’s responses and lets users call up third-party tools in their everyday conversations.
This gives developers better distribution for their apps and gives users a more seamless experience. Instead of jumping between seventeen different apps to plan a vacation, book accommodations, create an itinerary, and make a playlist for the flight, you could theoretically do it all through one conversation with ChatGPT.
The implications are massive. We’re potentially looking at a future where traditional app interfaces become less relevant, replaced by conversational interactions that feel more natural. Instead of learning how each app works, you just... talk. It’s the ultimate user interface—one that’s been around since humans developed language.
OpenAI isn’t operating in a vacuum here. Google has been pushing its Gemini AI hard, Microsoft is deeply invested in AI through its partnership with OpenAI (talk about hedging your bets), and countless startups are building AI agents and assistants. The race to become the platform through which people access digital services is heating up fast.
What makes OpenAI’s approach interesting is the speed of execution. The company completed a secondary share sale that made it the most valuable startup in the world, launched Sora (a social video app that quickly rose to the top of Apple’s App Store), and announced multiple large infrastructure deals with Nvidia and AMD—all within a few frenzied weeks.
It’s the kind of pace that makes you wonder if they’re using AI to schedule their product launches. Actually, given the company we’re talking about, they probably are.
Of course, there’s a question that should keep everyone up at night: what happens when one company has access to your music preferences, travel plans, home searches, design work, and basically every other digital service you use? The article doesn’t mention privacy considerations, which is itself telling.
Apps are available to users outside of the EU—a caveat that likely reflects Europe’s stricter data protection regulations. For everyone else, the convenience of having one AI assistant handle everything comes with the implicit understanding that OpenAI is sitting in the middle of an enormous amount of personal data.
It’s worth thinking about, even if most people will inevitably trade privacy for convenience faster than you can say “I accept the terms and conditions without reading them.”
Strip away the hype, the market movements, and the tech industry’s perpetual need to declare everything “revolutionary,” and what are we left with? A genuinely useful development that could change how we interact with technology.
The promise is simple: instead of context-switching between apps, learning new interfaces, and remembering passwords (okay, having your browser remember passwords), you talk to ChatGPT and it handles the logistics. Planning a trip becomes a conversation, not a tab-juggling exercise. Creating a presentation goes from fighting with software to describing what you want.
The reality will likely be messier. Early integrations will probably be clunky. Some tasks will work brilliantly through conversational AI, while others will still be faster the old-fashioned way. Security issues will emerge. Someone will inevitably try to jailbreak the system to do something ridiculous.
But the direction is clear: OpenAI is betting big that conversational AI is the future interface for digital services. And with 800 million weekly users already on board, they might just be right.
Given their trajectory so far, betting against them might not be the wisest move. Just ask the stock market.
About the author: Rupesh Bhambwani is a technology enthusiast specializing in the broad technology industry dynamics and international technology policy.
When not obsessing over nanometer-scale transistors, energy requirements of AI models, real-world impacts of the AI revolution and staring at the stars, he can be found trying to explain to his relatives why their smartphones are actually miracles of modern engineering, usually to limited success.