For most of the smartphone era, software has reached people through a small number of stores. Apple and Google set the terms for listing, payment, and review, and developers treated those rules as the cost of distribution.
A product could be useful and still remain hard to find if it never cleared a store, never ranked, or never convinced someone to install it.
That arrangement is what OpenAI spent its developer conference, on September 29, 2026, treating as open to change.
The company did not announce a store that copies the old one.
It described ChatGPT, which it says now has 1.2 billion weekly users, as the surface where software is suggested, opened, and used.
At the same event it introduced 'GPT-6.1 Sol,' a model it presents as close to its stronger GPT-6 Astra at about a fifth of the price.
The two announcements sit together. A cheaper model makes it more practical to run agents and in-chat apps at volume. A chat interface with that many users is a place those apps can be found without a separate download.
OpenAI’s own posts described GPT-6.1 Sol as near-Astra intelligence and the most cost-efficient model for its performance available today.
On the API, standard pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. Cached input is $0.10 per million tokens, which the company said is 95% below standard input pricing and 50 percent below the cached rate for GPT-6 Sol.
The model is an upgrade over GPT-6 Sol on coding, computer use, and professional work, and OpenAI said it approaches Astra on several benchmarks at a lower cost.
It also said alignment tests moved closer to Astra: the model is more direct about its limits and more consistent about following user intent and safety constraints.
From September 29 it was available to Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu users in ChatGPT Work and Codex, and to developers through the API. It was not yet in the main Chat product.
However. the app changes are kind of broader than the model.
For starters, ChatGPT can now suggest users an app directly inside a conversation when it thinks that the app could finish the task. It can then let the user connect it and work in it without leaving the chat.
Plugin support now includes extensions, so a developer can put an interactive panel in the thread.
A design revision that once meant opening Figma or Adobe can, in this setup, happen in the same window as the conversation. OpenAI also showed a meeting tool inside ChatGPT that pulls calendar items, takes notes, and lists follow-ups.
Apps can be shared through a light page the system produces, with each person signing in under their own permissions.
A second piece is identity. "Sign in with ChatGPT" means that users can carry a ChatGPT login, and an existing usage allowance, into outside software. OpenAI named 16 launch partners, among them Cognition’s Devin, Notion, Vercel, T3, OpenClaw, and Dactyl. On the business side, an enterprise marketplace listed more than 30 partners, including Adobe, Figma, HubSpot, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Harvey, Palo Alto Networks, and CrowdStrike.
Eligible customers can apply part of an OpenAI commitment toward approved partner software. Plugin review was also changed so a developer can track a submission, see required fixes, ask for a human review, and update a plugin without starting over.
The agent layer is the part that most directly changes who chooses the software.
OpenAI’s agents, called Dots, each get a cloud computer and a browser, can reach more than 4,000 connected apps, and can do background research in a read-only mode. Actions still need user approval.
Long story short, what OpenAI has actually put in place is a discovery and execution layer inside a product people already open, priced so that a near-frontier model is cheap enough to run often.
What it has not put in place is the economic machinery of an app store: a standard cut, a payments rail, or a rulebook with the force of Apple's or Google's.
Developers get another channel. Users get fewer reasons to leave the chat to finish a task.
In the end, OpenAI tries to rewrite the store rules, or perhaps by just sitting beside them, and hoping that people will accept an agent choosing the tool.
It's worth noting though, that Microsoft does have a store, but it does not govern Windows the same way like Apple and Google. Most desktop software is still downloaded from a developer's site or another installer, meaning that Microsoft Store is optional for ordinary Windows apps.
