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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- At OpenAI DevDay, the company unveiled new capabilities for apps in ChatGPT.
- This is a preview of a more all-encompassing ChatGPT experience.
- Nick Turley, Head of ChatGPT, says it will act more like an operating system.
Over the past year, numerous developments have occurred in the AI space, including agentic assistants that can carry out tasks on your behalf and more seamless, multimodal ways to interact with chatbots. Yet, the way you can interact with ChatGPT has remained mostly unchanged: it’s an AI chatbot with a traditional Q&A format. That may change soon.
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At OpenAI DevDay 2025, the company took the stage to unveil a range of updates designed to help developers build and deploy AI solutions more efficiently. A major highlight was the launch of the Apps SDK, which, in simple terms, enables developers to build actual Apps within the ChatGPT interface. This is a glimpse into the next phase of OpenAI’s core product, which Nick Turley, Head of ChatGPT, told me in a press Q&A would function like an OS.
“What you’re going to see over the next six months is an evolution from an app that is really useful into something that feels a little bit more like an operating system where you can access business services and you can access software, both the existing software they’re used to, but more importantly and most excitingly, new software that’s been built natively on top of ChatGPT.”
During the DevDay keynote, we already got a glimpse of what this could possibly look like through ChatGPT App pilot partner demos. For example, Alexi Christakis, a software engineer at OpenAI, led a live demo showcasing the integration of the Canva app within ChatGPT. He was able to request that Canva create a poster directly within the chatbot, which was able to produce four posters in line. He later had Canva convert the posters into a slide deck, again using a simple ChatGPT prompt.
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This, of course, isn’t OpenAI’s first stab at apps, with experiences such as custom chatbots or GPTs previously available within the chatbot. However, those were mostly limited to an inline chatbot text exchange. A distinguishing factor of the new apps is their deep integration into the ChatGPT experience. When announcing the Apps SDK during the keynote, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said it was opening app building to developers to “enable a new generation of apps that are interactive, adaptive, and personalized that you can chat with.”
Another example of this interactivity was highlighted in the Zillow app demo, where Christakis was able to filter down the house results he wanted by simply using a text prompt. This is a far more seamless experience than having to select multiple different toggles on the Zillow website to achieve the desired results.
Being able to view apps in full-screen was also another major upgrade, opening the opportunity for more developers to build experiences within ChatGPT that are more consistent with the app. At launch, the App SDK partners include household names such as Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, and Spotify, with 11 additional partners expected to join later in the year. The App SDK is now available in preview for developers starting today. Later this year, developers will be able to submit apps for review to be listed.
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All users, regardless of subscription tier, can access these apps. To activate the app, simply start a message to ChatGPT with the name of an available app at the beginning of the prompt. The chatbot will also suggest relevant chatbots based on your conversation.
In the future, these apps may also leverage agentic features that perform tasks proactively on your behalf. Regardless of what the apps are actually built to do, Turley reassured users that what ChatGPT is capable of doing will be “greatly expanded” and should feel “meaningfully different.”
