OpenAI announced its Apps SDK at DevDay 2025 on Oct. 6 in San Francisco, fundamentally transforming ChatGPT from a conversational AI into a comprehensive application platform. With this announcement, ChatGPT is no longer just a chatbot. It is transforming into a complete platform that could become the “super app” responsible for managing various other applications users interact with.

Instead of treating AI as a feature added to existing apps, OpenAI is bringing entire apps into ChatGPT’s AI-centric context, flipping the usual approach. The result is a chat-driven environment where you can invoke apps on demand by name or context and accomplish tasks without juggling separate websites or programs.

In this article, I analyze how the OpenAI Apps SDK is turning ChatGPT into a super app and even an AI operating system. I discuss what this evolution signifies for developers, users, and the broader tech community.

From Chatbot to AI Super App

OpenAI’s Apps SDK initiative effectively makes ChatGPT a super app, akin to an app store woven into an AI assistant. The Apps SDK represents a fundamentally different approach to AI integration than competitors are pursuing. Where Google enhances Chrome with Gemini capabilities and Perplexity positions itself as an AI-powered answer engine, OpenAI is bringing entire applications into the AI conversation itself. Users invoke apps through natural language commands like “Spotify, make a playlist for my party” or “Zillow, find apartments in Tokyo under $3000,” without leaving the ChatGPT interface.

Launch partners — including Spotify, Canva, Zillow, Figma, Coursera, Expedia, and Booking.com — demonstrate the breadth of this platform vision. These apps render interactive components directly in chat, including maps, playlists, design tools and video content. The SDK built on the open Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides developers immediate access to OpenAI’s massive user base without traditional app store distribution challenges. Sam Altman stated at DevDay that this enables “a new generation of apps that are interactive, adaptive and personalized, that you can chat with.”

With the already-defined Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP), co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe, the company has a way to integrate payments and checkouts into ChatGPT. This fills a key gap that other AI applications lack.

With 800 million weekly users already engaged in ChatGPT, the company controls the interface layer where users spend their time.

OpenAI’s strategic advantage lies in user attention economics. With 800 million weekly users already engaged in ChatGPT, the company controls the interface layer where users spend their time.

OpenAI’s strategy differs fundamentally from Google’s approach of adding AI features to existing platforms like Chrome, which serves 3 billion users but maintains traditional browsing paradigms. Google is rolling out Gemini in Chrome, with capabilities including multitab analysis and agentic features for appointment booking and grocery ordering. However, this enhancement model preserves the browser as the primary interface with AI, treating it as an augmentation rather than an orchestration layer.

Perplexity pursues a third path with its answer engine focused on research accuracy and citation-backed responses. The company launched its Comet browser in July 2025 at $200 per month, targeting specialized research use cases. While Perplexity excels at information discovery with transparent sourcing, it lacks ChatGPT’s scale and breadth. The competitive landscape now features three distinct philosophies about how AI integrates with user workflows and where intelligence resides in the software stack.

When it comes to Microsoft, the strategy diverges in its orientation. While OpenAI builds an AI-native platform centered on ChatGPT as the application environment, Microsoft embeds AI across its existing productivity stack. Copilot experiences are tightly integrated into Office, Windows and Azure, ensuring developers and enterprise users encounter AI in familiar contexts. The company’s approach treats AI as a fabric woven through applications and infrastructure, rather than a separate destination. Similar to Google, Microsoft’s advantage lies in distribution. Windows and Office still dominate the workplace, giving the company embedded access to billions of endpoints. Its challenge is that user engagement remains fragmented across apps, whereas OpenAI consolidates engagement into a single conversational layer.

Dimension	OpenAI (ChatGPT)	Google (Gemini)	Microsoft (Copilot)	Perplexity (Comet)
Philosophy	Apps-in-AI – AI as the core OS.	AI-in-Apps – enhancement layer.	AI-in-Apps – enterprise fabric.	AI-as-Research – accuracy and transparency.
Distribution	ChatGPT app (800M+ users).	Search, Chrome, Android, Workspace.	Microsoft 365, Windows, Azure.	Comet browser and Perplexity web/app.
Developer Focus	ISVs via Apps SDK and App Directory.	Firebase, Vertex AI, Cloud developers.	Enterprise and ISVs via Copilot Studio.	Researchers and API partners.
Monetization	App Store rev share, ACP fees, API calls.	Cloud and Workspace subscriptions, ads.	Copilot licenses, Azure usage.	Premium ($200/mo) plans, API access.
Interface Model	Conversational + inline GUI.	Browser-centric with AI add-ons.	Embedded assistants in existing apps.	Standalone, citation-driven research UI.
Ecosystem Goal	AI-native app platform.	Preserve web/app dominance.	Strengthen enterprise AI integration.	Lead in trusted AI research.
User Value	One conversational hub for all tasks.	Familiar tools with AI boost.	Unified enterprise productivity.	Verified, source-backed answers.
Strategic Aim	Make ChatGPT the AI OS.	Keep AI within existing interfaces.	Own enterprise AI stack.	Dominate high-trust knowledge search.

Deconstructing the ‘ChatGPT as an OS’ Strategy

The technical architecture of Apps SDK integrated with ChatGPT serves a larger strategic ambition. OpenAI executives have explicitly framed the evolution of ChatGPT as the creation of a new computing platform, akin to an operating system, and designed to become the central portal through which users access a wide range of digital services.

This “ChatGPT as an OS” concept is more than a metaphor. It deeply reflects a structured platform strategy adopted by OpenAI. In this analogy, the core GPT models function as the kernel, managing the fundamental computational resources of reasoning and language. The core APIs, such as the Responses API, act as the system calls providing low-level access to the kernel’s functions. The ChatGPT interface itself serves as the shell, the primary layer for user interaction. Finally, the newly announced Apps SDK and AgentKit provide the high-level developer toolkits for building third-party applications that run on this new operating system.

Traditional OS Component	OpenAI Ecosystem Counterpart	Function in the Ecosystem
Kernel	GPT Foundation Models (e.g., GPT-5 Pro)	Manages core computational resources (reasoning, language generation, multimodal understanding).
System Calls	Core APIs (e.g., Responses API, Realtime API)	Provides low-level, programmatic access for developers to the kernel’s capabilities.
Shell	ChatGPT User Interface (Web, Mobile)	The primary interactive layer for users to issue commands and receive output from the OS.
Application Layer	Third-Party Apps (e.g., Spotify, Canva)	Provides specific functionalities and services to the user, built by external developers.
Developer Toolkit (SDK)	Apps SDK, AgentKit	High-level libraries and tools that simplify the process of building for the application layer.
Filesystem / Data Layer	User conversation history, connected data sources	Manages and provides access to persistent data and context for the user and applications.

Integral to the OS strategy is the creation of a new marketplace, an app directory built directly into ChatGPT, where users can discover and enable third-party integrations. OpenAI will govern this marketplace through a review and approval process, featuring applications that meet high standards for functionality and design.

The company has also signaled its intent to introduce monetization tools, allowing developers to generate revenue from their creations, likely through a revenue-sharing model similar to those used by Apple and Google. The creation of this two-sided market is designed to trigger a powerful flywheel effect. A growing user base attracts more developers, whose applications make the platform more valuable and useful, which in turn attracts more users. By controlling this marketplace, OpenAI becomes the gatekeeper, managing discovery, standards, and monetization, granting it immense leverage over the ecosystem built upon its platform.

The Microsoft Paradox: From Indispensable Partner to Formidable Rival

The most complex dynamic is OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft. While Microsoft is a crucial investor and infrastructure partner, the two companies are now on a competitive collision course.

Microsoft is aggressively building its own developer ecosystem around Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio, a low-code platform for enterprises to build custom agents that integrate with their internal data sources like Microsoft Graph. This offering directly competes with OpenAI’s effort to attract the same enterprise developers to its platform.

The launch of the ChatGPT app platform is a necessary declaration of independence, a strategic move to own the end-user and developer relationship directly.

If OpenAI had remained purely a model provider, it risked being commoditized as an ingredient in Microsoft’s platform. The launch of the ChatGPT app platform is, therefore, a necessary declaration of independence, a strategic move to own the end-user and developer relationship directly. This forces a new era of “co-opetition,” in which partners must compete for the dominant platform role in the AI stack.

Conclusion

The launch of the ChatGPT app platform is not an incremental update but a foundational shift toward a new model of AI-native computing. It signals a future in which software development may shift from building discrete, siloed applications to creating specialized services orchestrated by a central AI agent.

For developers and ISVs (Independent Software Vendors), this moment requires careful strategic consideration. The distribution opportunity is undeniable, but it comes with the inherent risks of platform dependency. A prudent approach would involve identifying specific use cases within existing products that could benefit from the new hybrid conversational-graphical interface. For businesses with a transactional component, developing a strategy for agentic commerce by evaluating the ACP specification is now a competitive necessity.

Finally, while exploring the opportunities on OpenAI’s platform, developers should seek to mitigate long-term risk by maintaining a multiplatform strategy and focusing on building applications that bring unique, proprietary data and functionality, making them less susceptible to being replicated by the platform owner.

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