Earlier this year, OpenAI announced ChatGPT apps. Not the ChatGPT app, mind you: That's been out for more than a couple years now. ChatGPT apps, on the other hand, are programs that work within ChatGPT. You can access them in any given conversation with ChatGPT—in fact, they may appear based on the context of the conversation. These aren't necessarily apps that OpenAI builds itself, either; rather, you'll find options here based on apps you may use yourself. The initial batch of apps included with the feature's rollout included Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, Spotify, and Zillow—big apps you've likely used before. While in a conversation with ChatGPT, you could ask the bot to help you book a flight to Paris via Expedia, find a particular listing through Zillow, or create a slide for a presentation with Canva. From OpenAI's perspective, this adds a host of additional functionality to ChatGPT the company couldn't offer itself. OpenAI doesn't need to build an apartment-hunting tool into ChatGPT; it can just pull in Zillow. It also doesn't escape me that the more apps that OpenAI folds into ChatGPT, the less likely it is you'll need to leave ChatGPT to do something in another app—but that's none of my business. ChatGPT's "app store" isn't really a store Credit: Lifehacker Speaking of more apps, the company plans to expand these apps overtime, as developers create ChatGPT-compatible extensions for their programs. That was part of yesterday's news: OpenAI is now letting developers submit apps to ChatGPT en masse. What's more, these apps will be hosted in an "app directory," though many online are taking to calling it an app store. (There's no payment necessary, however, so app directory might really be a more apt description.) You'll find this new app directory in the sidebar of ChatGPT, appropriately called "Apps." Apps is apparently in beta, according to a label affixed to its title in ChatGPT. Here, you'll find a rotating slide featuring an ad for some of the service's biggest apps, like Canva and Zillow, and, below it, rows of apps to choose from. Right now, the apps are sorted into "Featured," "Lifestyle," and "Productivity," with no option that includes all the apps. (But they seem to be entirely split across Lifestyle and Productivity.) There are a lot of options here already. Some made headlines this week, like Photoshop and Apple Music, while others arrived more quietly, like Asana, Uber, and Target. It's not just traditional apps like Zillow or Spotify that are getting the app treatment here, either. OpenAI is also considering "connector" services, like Google Drive, as "apps." You can click on any app in the directory to see what you can do with it. Slack, for example, says you can look up your chats and messages to summarize threads, generate recaps, and come up with responses. You can check on your Asana tasks to generate progress reports and status updates. Outlook says you can create "talking points" and generate follow-ups from your emails and calendar events. While there's a brief summary underneath each title, you'll need to click through to each service to see the full picture of what it actually offers. Here are the apps I'm seeing at this time. Just note this might not be a complete list, especially as OpenAI continues to add more apps to the service: Adobe Acrobat Adobe Express Adobe Photoshop Agentforce Sales Aha! Airtable AllTrails Amplitude Apple Music Asana Atlassian Rovo Azure Boards Basecamp Booking.com Box Canva Clay Cloudinary Conductor Coursera Daloopa DoorDash Dropbox Egnyte Expedia Figma GitLab Issues Google Drive Help Scout Hex HighLevel Hugging Face Instacart Intuit Credit Karma Intuit Mailchimp Intuit TurboTax Khan Academy Klaviyo Linear Lovable LSEG Monday.com Morningstar Netlify Notion OpenTable Outlook Calendar Outlook Email Peloton Pipedrive PitchBook Ramp Replit SharePoint Slack Spotify Stripe Target Teams Teamwork.com TheFork Thumbtack Tripadvisor Uber Uber Eats Vercel Zillow Zoho Zoho Desk Zoom If you're an avid ChatGPT user and frequently switch between it and any of the apps on this list, there might be some utility here. Maybe coders will find the integration with Hugging Face and Lovable to be beneficial, while Photoshop users might take advantage of the AI image editing tools this integration provides. But I'm still left feeling like this is more gimmick than anything else: I don't need to connect my Slack to ChatGPT to generate follow-ups for me: I'm perfectly capable of responding to emails myself, and managing my own calendar, so no need to connect Outlook or another email client to the bot. Maybe a future update will sell me on connecting generative AI to all aspects of my work and personal life, but so far, I'm still not convinced.