App submissions for ChatGPT are now open to developers

If you're a developer who has been waiting to bring your app into ChatGPT, the door is now officially open. You can submit your app for review and, once approved, it will appear in a new in-product directory where ChatGPT's massive user base can discover it. This article explains what's changed, how the submission process works, and what tools OpenAI provides to help you build chat-native experiences that let users take real-world actions without ever leaving the conversation.

What's New: From Experiment to Directory

Until now, building apps for ChatGPT felt a bit like working with a preview—interesting technology, but limited reach. That changes with this announcement. OpenAI has moved past the experimental phase: developers can now submit their apps for review, and approved apps get listed in a directory built directly into the product itself.

This matters because discoverability has always been the hard part. A great integration means little if nobody can find it. With a native directory inside ChatGPT, users can browse and find apps in the same place where they already chat, plan, and work. For developers, that means the distribution problem is largely solved for you—your app sits in front of an audience of hundreds of millions.

The Apps SDK: Building for Conversation

Alongside the submission pipeline, OpenAI has updated the Apps SDK, the toolkit developers use to create these experiences. The idea behind chat-native apps is simple but powerful: instead of forcing users to switch between ChatGPT and a separate website or mobile app, your product's capabilities live inside the conversation itself.

Concretely, that means a user could book a trip, order food, browse a catalog, or complete a purchase while talking to ChatGPT. The conversation becomes the interface. The updated SDK is designed to help developers build these interactions so they feel natural rather than bolted on—responding to what the user says, showing rich UI when it helps, and handing real-world actions back to the underlying service.

For teams that already have web apps or APIs, this is an opportunity to reach users at the moment of intent, right where they're already typing their request.

Review and Guidelines: What Developers Should Expect

Opening an app directory comes with responsibility, and OpenAI has paired the submission process with updated guidelines. Before your app goes live, it goes through a review. While the specifics of approval criteria live in the official documentation, the general expectation is clear: apps should be safe, reliable, and genuinely useful within a conversational context.

The updated guidelines and developer tools exist to help you get there. If you're planning to submit, it's worth reading through the requirements carefully before you build, so you don't end up reworking your integration to pass review. Treat the guidelines as design input, not just a compliance checklist—apps that feel native to chat tend to be the ones that succeed.

Why This Matters for the Broader Ecosystem

This move signals something bigger than a new feature. Chat platforms are becoming distribution channels in their own right, similar to how app stores reshaped mobile software a decade and a half ago. A directory inside ChatGPT gives smaller developers a shot at visibility they could never buy through traditional marketing, while giving users a reason to stay inside one environment for more of their daily tasks.

For the people building these apps, the opportunity is to rethink what "using your product" means when the entry point is a sentence typed into a chat window. The teams that design for conversation—rather than shrinking their existing UI into a chat bubble—are likely to stand out in the early days of the directory.

Getting Started

If you're ready to build, the path is straightforward in outline: explore the updated Apps SDK documentation, design an experience that fits naturally into conversation, test it thoroughly, and then submit it for review. Once approved, your app appears in the in-product directory, where ChatGPT users can find and use it.

This is an early moment in what could become a major platform shift. Developers who start now will have a head start on learning what works when software meets conversation.