alt Hacker News> Apps extend ChatGPT conversations by bringing in new context and letting users take actions like order groceries, turn an outline into a slide deck, or search for an apartment.
Between this description and their guidelines these don't really sound like "apps", but a way to integrate an existing app with ChatGPT sessions.
I'm trying to figure out what's in it for the developer other than ultimately taking users away from ChatGPT. And just like what happened with Alexa skills, these "apps" will become useless when they are unmaintained.
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The idea behind Apps is that they can expand the capabilities of ChatGPT in multiple ways. Text-only MCPs are a type of app that can provide both actions and context in your conversations, but Apps can do much more now that you can bring in custom UI in multiple formats (card, full-screen, etc) as we showed at DevDay in October. Btw UI is proposed for the MCP spec in SEP-1865.
Since then, I’ve seen some very impressive demos and I’m excited to see what developers create on the platform as that’s always the coolest part.
Chatgpt apps are MCP servers with a UI resource (can be a react component or vanilla js) that gets shown in an frame one the tool is called by chatgpt. So you can't just port an existing app, but you can reuse the same backend Api wrapped inside an mcp server, and some of the components that you need to adapt to openai ux requirements. I practice this means developing an app from scratch.