ChatGPT's app platform is sending its partners little traffic

About 300 integrations are available inside ChatGPT, but they are hard for users to find and have delivered little traffic to the companies that built them, Bloomberg reported on 30 March 2026, according to PYMNTS, which summarised the reporting the same day.

The complaints Bloomberg collected were specific. Some partners had deliberately limited what their apps could do in order to keep the customer relationship and the payment on their own systems. Some found users reluctant to give card details to an AI assistant. Some received almost no data on how their apps were performing. Some said OpenAI's approval process was slow. An OpenAI spokesperson told Bloomberg: "We're still early in building this out, and we recognize there are areas where the developer experience needs to improve."

What OpenAI promised when it launched the platform was larger. At its DevDay developer conference on 6 October 2025, Sam Altman said more than 800 million people used ChatGPT each week, that 4 million developers had built with OpenAI and that the company processed more than 6 billion tokens a minute through its API, TechCrunch reported that day. The Apps SDK, built on the Model Context Protocol, was the centrepiece, with Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, Spotify and Zillow among the launch partners.

The build out largely happened on schedule. OpenAI opened app submissions and launched an app directory in December 2025, VentureBeat reported, with reviewed apps rolling out to users from early 2026.

The commerce layer went backwards. Stripe announced on 29 September 2025 that it was powering Instant Checkout in ChatGPT and releasing the Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard co-developed with OpenAI, beginning with Etsy sellers and Shopify merchants including Glossier, Vuori, Spanx and SKIMS. By 6 March 2026, Digital Commerce 360 reported OpenAI saying that "Instant Checkout is moving to Apps, where purchases can happen more seamlessly", with merchants including Target, DoorDash and Instacart running their own checkouts inside their ChatGPT apps.

OpenAI's own developer documentation records the retreat plainly. Its Apps SDK monetisation page describes external checkout on the developer's own domain as the recommended and generally available approach, and says checkout with the ChatGPT payment sheet is "limited to select marketplaces today and is not available to all users". The promise that users would transact without leaving the chat remains a restricted beta.

The agent tooling has been cut back harder. OpenAI's deprecations page records that Agent Builder, the visual workflow tool that was AgentKit's public face, and the Evals platform were both deprecated on 3 June 2026 and become unavailable on 30 November 2026, with developers directed to the Agents SDK or to ChatGPT Workspace Agents. The headline product of one DevDay is being switched off before the next one.

What did grow is the audience. TechCrunch reported on 27 February 2026 that OpenAI said ChatGPT had passed 900 million weekly active users and 50 million paying subscribers, disclosed alongside a US$110 billion funding round at a US$730 billion pre-money valuation. AFP reported on 1 August 2026 that OpenAI said its models "now reach more than one billion active users and more than two million businesses" across ChatGPT, Codex and ChatGPT Work.

So the audience thesis held and the ecosystem thesis has not, at least not yet. The comparison DevDay invited, to an app store challenging Apple and Google, assumed that distribution was the scarce thing. On the evidence so far, discovery is the scarce thing. An assistant that answers in prose has no shelf, no charts and no icons, and OpenAI has not built a substitute for them. A developer who ships into ChatGPT gets access to a very large number of people who will probably never learn the app exists.

That is not the same as failure. Three hundred integrations in six months is a real ecosystem by any ordinary measure, and OpenAI has conceded publicly that the developer experience needs work. But it is a long way from the DevDay pitch, in which access to hundreds of millions of users without app store friction was the incentive offered to developers.

OpenAI DevDay 2026 is on 29 September at Fort Mason in San Francisco, with the opening keynote livestreamed free, according to the event site. That is where the company will have to say whether apps in ChatGPT are a platform or a feature.

Several things remain unresolved. OpenAI has not published figures for app usage, developer earnings or directory traffic, so the only public account of how the platform is performing comes from partners talking to reporters. In-chat payments remain restricted to selected marketplaces with no announced date for general availability. Developers who built on Agent Builder have until 30 November 2026 to migrate, and OpenAI's own guidance notes that exported code does not carry the workflow graph across unchanged. Whether the September keynote answers any of that, or announces another layer on top of it, is the thing to watch.