Why OpenAI’s ChatGPT app store is struggling six months in

OpenAI’s ChatGPT app store is not working the way the company hoped. 

Six months after rolling out mini apps from companies like Spotify and Booking, the push is still off to a slow start. More than 300 app integrations are now available inside ChatGPT, but the developers say they are hard to find, approvals can be a drag, the tools are buggy, and the usage data is thin once an app goes live. 

The more stubborn problem is business, not software. A lot of partners still do not want OpenAI sitting between them and the customer, especially when payments and repeat business are involved.

You can see that in the best-known examples. Booking chief executive Glenn Fogel told Bloomberg that traffic from ChatGPT is still small and that it is easier to discover listings on Booking.com. Where the estimates of Uber rides are fare inside the chatbot, but users still have to leave the app to finish booking. And StubHub has similar constraints that buyers still need to jump out to complete the purchase, and even to zoom in on a seating map. 

The apps are there. The important part still happens somewhere else.

That matters as OpenAI was not treating this as a side experiment. In its 24th March shopping update the same idea was pushed from another angle, with richer product discovery, side-by-side comparisons, and more visual shopping inside ChatGPT. The goal is to see if people start searching, comparing, and acting inside one conversation, ChatGPT stops looking like just a chatbot and starts looking like a new layer on top of shopping and search.

Also read: Microsoft taps Anthropic for Copilot Cowork in push for AI agents

Apple has already reacted to that possibility. Apple introduced a mini apps policy last November that takes a 15% cut on purchases made inside so-called super apps.

For OpenAI the platform is central to its strategy and developer experience still needs work. The partner names are real, the product is live, and the pitch is obvious. But even at six months in, most of the experience still ends with the user leaving ChatGPT to do the actual transaction somewhere else.