It was a long time coming, but OpenAI finally launched the official ChatGPT app for iPhone on Thursday. The ChatGPT app is free to download, doesn’t have ads, syncs with your chat history across devices, and includes all of the latest large language model improvements. If you want to give it a try, you can download it from the App Store right now.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT app is here to save the App Store
This is big news for more reasons than you might realize. Currently, ChatGPT is the preeminent generative AI chatbot (with several rivals hot on its heels), so having an official app brings the bot to thousands, if not millions, of users who might never have used it otherwise. But this could also foil some of the scams that have flooded the App Store in recent weeks from developers taking advantage of the sudden interest in generative AI.
Security researchers at Sophos this week highlighted a number of “fleeceware” apps on the App Store, which are apps that charge money “for functionality that is already free elsewhere.” Some of the recent ChatGPT-powered apps that have been popping up on the App Store lately qualify as fleeceware, as they encourage users to pay for a premium subscription as soon as they open the app. Many of these apps have been downloaded thousands of times already.
Not all of these apps are scams, but they don’t do anything the official ChatGPT can’t, especially if you pay for ChatGPT Plus. Some third-party apps might even have a more intuitive UI than the official app, but if you don’t want to be pressured into paying for a premium subscription and you can’t stand looking at ads, you might want to switch to OpenAI’s app.
OpenAI says that it is starting the rollout of the ChatGPT app in the US, but that it will expand to additional countries in the coming weeks. The company also notes that an Android version of the app is in the works, but didn’t provide a release date.
