OpenAI Turns ChatGPT Into an App Store With 4,000+ Apps, Autonomous Agents, and Shared Identity Login

OpenAI unveiled a set of Dev Day features on Tuesday designed to turn ChatGPT into a discovery, distribution, and identity layer for software—positioning the chatbot as a direct challenger to the traditional app store model run by Apple and Google.

According to OpenAI, ChatGPT now has 1.2 billion weekly users. The company is leveraging that scale by making ChatGPT surface app suggestions mid-conversation when it detects a task a third-party app could help with. Users can then connect and use that app without leaving the chat interface.

Extensions and in-chat apps

The update expands ChatGPT's plugin architecture to support "extensions"—interactive panels that let developers build AI-native versions of their apps directly inside ChatGPT. In a Dev Day demo, OpenAI showed a meeting app that pulls in calendar events, takes AI-generated notes during meetings, and delivers a summary of follow-up items afterward. Design tools from Figma and Adobe were also shown running inside the ChatGPT interface.

Apps built this way can be shared through lightweight websites ChatGPT generates, letting coworkers sign in with their own credentials and permissions.

Sign in with ChatGPT

A new "Sign in with ChatGPT" feature lets users carry their ChatGPT identity into third-party apps and apply their existing AI usage allowance there. OpenAI listed 16 launch partners, including Cognition's Devin, Notion, Vercel, T3, OpenClaw, and Dactyl, with more planned.

Enterprise marketplace and review process

OpenAI also launched an enterprise app marketplace with more than 30 partners at launch, including Adobe, Figma, Salesforce, ServiceNow, HubSpot, Sierra, Decagon, Harvey, Legora, Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and Baseten. Eligible enterprise customers can apply part of their existing OpenAI spending commitment toward approved partner software, according to OpenAI.

Separately, OpenAI streamlined its plugin review process—its equivalent of Apple's App Review—allowing developers to track review status, see required fixes, request human review, and update plugin tools without restarting the entire submission.

Dots: autonomous agents as the new interface

Alongside the app-surface changes, OpenAI introduced autonomous AI agents called Dots. Each Dot runs on its own cloud computer and browser instance and can access OpenAI's ecosystem of what the company says is more than 4,000 connected apps. Dots can perform tasks independently and conduct what OpenAI calls "proactive research" in read-only mode—surfacing help with a project or flagging a forgotten task—though actions still require user approval.

The design shifts responsibility for choosing which app to use away from the user and toward the agent, which can pull in whatever tool or app the task requires.

No billing layer disclosed

OpenAI did not announce a revenue-sharing or billing system comparable to the cut Apple and Google take on app store transactions. The company also has not said whether these features will replace separate third-party subscriptions—app makers could still charge users directly on their own websites, then let those accounts connect to ChatGPT or Codex.

What this means

OpenAI is assembling the pieces of an app-store rival without the store's economics: discovery through conversational suggestions, an identity layer via Sign in with ChatGPT, a marketplace for enterprise partners, and Dots agents that reduce the need for users to seek out specific apps at all. What's missing is the piece that made app stores profitable for platform owners—a standardized cut of transactions. Until OpenAI addresses billing and revenue share, this looks more like a distribution play to keep users and developers inside ChatGPT than a complete substitute for Apple's or Google's app economies. The claimed scale—1.2 billion weekly users and 4,000-plus connected apps—gives OpenAI leverage developers will find hard to ignore, but the absence of a monetization framework leaves the most contentious part of the app-store comparison unresolved.