OpenAI just started approving ChatGPT & MCP Apps. This is a bigger deal than most people realize.

For the first time, you can build software that lives directly inside ChatGPT—where hundreds of millions of people already are. Your app understands what they're talking about, takes action on the spot, and never sends them elsewhere.

This kind of moment doesn't come around often.

The App Store Comparison Everyone's Making (and Why It's Actually Valid)

When the iPhone App Store launched in 2008, there were maybe six million iPhones in the world. Developers who shipped early carved out positions they held for years.

ChatGPT already has hundreds of millions of users. You're not betting on future growth—the magnitude is even more massive than the App Store.

I Built Three Apps in an Afternoon. Here's What Changed.

Tools like Fractal turned this into a completely different game. I've gone from idea to deployed app in under 15 minutes.

After building a few apps that quickly, I realized something: building isn't the hard part anymore, it's having great ideas. And this is a completely new platform, so it's hard to wrap your head around how it works and get inspiration for good ideas.

Three Patterns That Actually Work

If you're struggling to find ideas, these patterns may be helpful:

1. ChatGPT & MCP Apps That Use Conversation Context

Example: I ask ChatGPT for a recipe. It gives me one. Then I have to open Instacart, manually copy ingredients, and recreate the list. That's annoying.

Instead of opening Instacart and manually copying ingredients, I just call the Instacart ChatGPT & MCP App. Since it knows the context of my conversation and the ingredients ChatGPT suggested, I don't have to mention the ingredients again. I just need to say: add these ingredients to my cart. This saves me tons of time, hence the app is very useful to me.

This category of apps are valuable because they help users not have to repeat themselves. If you want to build this category of apps, look for these friction points:

  • Turning conversations into actual files (reports, invoices, presentations)
  • Taking action on plans ChatGPT helped create (booking, scheduling, ordering)
  • Displaying information better (tables, graphs, structured summaries)

Simple test: if you're copy-pasting from ChatGPT into another app, that workflow should probably be a ChatGPT & MCP App.

2. Apps That Use ChatGPT Inference, Not Just Chat

If your app is a simple wrapper around ChatGPT, instead of being a separate app, you can try making a ChatGPT & MCP App instead.

One interesting thing I built using this idea was a trivia game. Instead of calling a ChatGPT API, my trivia game uses ChatGPT for inference (creating questions) before passing the questions as tool input.

If you want to build apps that take advantage of ChatGPT's inference instead of calling ChatGPT API, examples of apps in this category:

  • Games where ChatGPT creates the content
  • Apps where ChatGPT acts as a judge or referee
  • Experiences where ChatGPT adds personality

The mental shift: put your app inside ChatGPT, not ChatGPT inside your app. Tools like Fractal helped this click for me because they force you to think in conversation, not pages.

3. Apps That Take Advantage of ChatGPT Distribution

Most products fail because nobody finds them. ChatGPT solves that problem—the users are already there.

If you already have a product, ChatGPT & MCP Apps are a killer top-of-funnel:

  • Surface one or two high-value features directly in chat
  • Let people experience value immediately
  • Guide them to your full product when they need more

Think of ChatGPT & MCP Apps as the front door, not the entire house.

Stop Thinking in Pages

The biggest mistake I see—especially from experienced builders—is designing like it's a website.

ChatGPT & MCP Apps aren't websites. The best ones feel like they're just part of the conversation.

That's why I ended up using Fractal for most of my recent apps. It forces conversation-first thinking and makes testing ideas ridiculously fast.

The Window Won't Stay Open

OpenAI is approving apps and expanding the SDK. This is still early. The distribution advantage is real, but it won't last forever.

The hard part isn't building anymore. It's deciding what to build.

ChatGPT & MCP Apps make experimentation cheap. Modern tools make it fast. The only question is what you're going to build?

If you want to learn more about the ChatGPT & MCP Apps ecosystem and how to build apps, I have a YouTube playlist that covers how to build ChatGPT & MCP Apps with Fractal here: Watch the YouTube Playlist

Ready to Build Your ChatGPT & MCP Apps?

Start building with Fractal today and get your app discovered by millions of ChatGPT users.