OpenAI hasn't yet turned ChatGPT into a new App Store: developers complain

OpenAI wanted to turn ChatGPT into a new center for digital services — a place where users don't just ask questions, but order rides, listen to music, and book hotels without leaving the chat. But six months after launching built-in mini-apps, this plan is stalling: the catalog is growing, but convenience and value for both users and developers remain limited.

Ambitions vs. Apple

When OpenAI opened a platform for third-party services within ChatGPT, the stakes looked high. Companies like Spotify and Booking got the ability to embed their mini-apps directly into the chat interface. The idea was straightforward: if a user is already spending time in ChatGPT, it makes sense to let them immediately perform the needed action — find a ticket, choose a hotel, or open a music service — without switching between separate apps and tabs.

In theory, this resembled the early logic of the App Store: first comes a platform with a wide audience, then a developer ecosystem grows around it, and eventually the entry point itself becomes more valuable than any single app. For OpenAI, this was also a way to reduce dependence on other people's platforms, primarily Apple, which controls access to users on iPhone and takes a commission from digital services.

Why the Launch is Stalling

On paper, there's progress: over six months, ChatGPT gained more than 300 integrations. But the mere existence of a catalog hasn't turned it into a familiar platform for daily use. These mini-apps, according to developers, are poorly hidden, and their functionality is often limited. A user might see an attractive integration interface, but doesn't always get the full-featured scenario that would justify accessing the service through chat in the first place.

The list of complaints from partners looks fairly straightforward:

• Long and tedious app approval process
• Raw and sometimes buggy development tools
• Lack of data on user engagement and behavior
• Limited functionality of the integrations themselves
• Poor visibility of apps within ChatGPT

For developers, this is a painful combination. If the platform provides little analytics, it's hard to understand exactly what people are launching, at what point they drop off, and which features are worth improving at all. And if the audience also struggles to find the apps themselves, it's harder for teams to justify to their own companies that spending time and budget on ChatGPT integration makes sense.

Where the Model Broke

The main problem appears to be not just OpenAI's tools, but the very structure of such a market. Partners are reluctant to hand over their customer relationships to OpenAI, and especially their payments. For any major service, this is no longer just a technical integration, but a question of control over audience, revenue, and brand.

If a user completes a purchase or subscription within someone else's interface, that interface's owner eventually becomes the main intermediary. Because of this, companies connect cautiously and often keep integrations on a short leash. As a result, OpenAI wants to create an ecosystem like the App Store, but without one key element: the participants' willingness to build truly full-featured products on that platform.

This creates a vicious cycle. Users don't see much benefit and rarely open mini-apps. Developers don't see traffic and aren't eager to invest deeper.

The platform grows in the number of partners, but not in habit formation.

What This Means

The mini-apps story shows that turning a popular chatbot into a full-fledged platform is harder than simply opening an integration showcase. You need not only partners and a catalog, but also clear distribution, stable tools, transparent analytics, and business confidence that they won't lose their customer inside someone else's interface. So far, OpenAI's project looks more like a strategic claim on the future than a real competitor to the App Store as it exists today.