OpenAI launched an Apps SDK on Monday (see here). This effectively means that developers can now build apps inside ChatGPT:
This was an obvious play by OpenAI and it was only a matter of time until more dynamic experiences made it into chat. After all its very difficult to do some of the most profitable internet activities (ie ecommerece, gaming etc) with text only. The writing was on the wall here ever since MCP-UI came out and Shopify started incorporating it earlier this year:
There are some really cool technical details in how this all works. We heavily invested in MCP-UI, an extension of the MCP protocol to allow exposing widgets that a host can choose to display. The product cards you see in the video are exposed through MCP-UI and then securely… pic.twitter.com/FNsrMiB1Uq
— tobi lutke (@tobi) August 5, 2025
Adding apps within the chat experience does 2 things:
1. it helps preserve the user within ChatGPT for longer
2. it gives OpenAI a significant amount of context on user behavior
From a strategic point of view, 2 is incredibly valuable. Users would traditionally leave ChatGPT and go to booking.com once they generated their trip plan. That prevented OpenAI from learning important information about the user - did they book the hotel that was presented to them? did they decide to do all of the suggested activities? This is personalization context that can help OpenAI be more useful to the user in the future.
It wasn't too long ago that ChatGPT gained the ability to reference prior conversations. That particular feature is now commonly referred to as memory. Memory is the personalization layer that helps ChatGPT answer questions better for you in the future, and in a world where model capabilities across labs are converging more and
more, what prevents users from switching LLMs is the huge cost of moving their "memories".
Once ChatGPT remembers the hotel that you like to stay in, the type of
food that you order on weekends and the type books you like to read before
bed, it is very hard to move away without losing a huge amount of personalization. As far as OpenAI is concerned, the more
activities the user can do within the chat app, the harder it becomes to leave.
In the same way that cookies allowed Google to become a default transaction layer for the internet, memory helps OpenAI own the personalization layer. In a world where Google owns the browser and Apple owns the device, it is very hard to stand out as the aggregator of personalization information across multiple applications - and yet that is exactly what memory + apps allows OpenAI to do, despite not owning the device or the browser. It will be interesting to see if Apple will allow ChatGPT "apps", because it technically violates their mega-app policy.
The timing here is perhaps notable. There is no real advantage in being a first mover. As the MCP-UI experience shows, there are a lot of hard problems to figure out and there is a big chance that some of this blows up in OpenAI's face. Google will inevitably add this capability to Gemini and it has all the right relationships to do so. Launching early doesn't help OpenAI tremendously, so why now ?
Perhaps one of the most obvious reasons to get going here is that OpenAI's devices efforts are very real and the sooner they can stand up an ecosystem (that spans all the apps customers already use today), the sooner they can have a viable standalone device.
Notably, there are more platform plays coming to ChatGPT soon. Sam Altman brought up "Sign In With ChatGPT" in May:
Sign in with ChatGPT incoming pic.twitter.com/u5gxAMYGOC
— ImpGPT (@impgpt) October 10, 2025
What better way to ensure that you have context on your users than allowing them to bring their OpenAI identity with them everywhere they go?
So..there it is. The inklings of a new platform emerging. Whether app publishers will be willing to do this is a totally different question. Giving your app away in this new modality has its risks and seeing how OpenAI is trying to do everything everywhere I would be cautious to move in this direction. Ultimately, users will decide for them. If chat is the way people browse the internet from now on, app publishers won't have a choice.