OpenAI Apps SDK: The New Browser Moment

When OpenAI announced its Apps SDK, most people saw it as another developer tool. But look closer, and it starts to feel like something much bigger - a reimagining of how we *use* the internet.

If you think about it, the Apps SDK is not just about adding third-party features into ChatGPT. It’s about turning ChatGPT into the new browser - the place where you search, discover, and get things done - without ever leaving the interface.

I tried to unpack what changes this might bring about, how it compares to other platform shifts, and what it means for developers, publishers, and the future of the web.

1. ChatGPT Is Becoming the New Browser

For decades, the browser has been our universal gateway to the internet. You typed something into Google, clicked a link, and landed on a website. Each site was responsible for doing what you needed - whether that was booking a flight, ordering food, or reading an article.

The Apps SDK changes that. Instead of sending you somewhere, ChatGPT can now do the thing right inside the chat.

Ask “Find me a holiday apartment on the Algarve coast in Portugal for 2 weeks from now” and instead of listing ten travel sites, ChatGPT can call the booking.com app (via the Apps SDK integration) and return actual flight options - all in one step.

In this new model, the assistant replaces the browser. You no longer visit websites. You trigger intents. And those intents get fulfilled by apps built to live inside the conversation.

That’s a fundamental shift. Search engines used to route traffic; now ChatGPT aims to execute actions.

To be fair, this is also what new browsers like Comet (from Perplexity) and Dia (from The Browser Company) are trying to do. But with Apps SDK, there is an official app integration rather than a computer-use model driving browser automation. Feels like the rubber-stamped, official way of doing things.

2. The Siri Parallel - But Global and Scalable

If this sounds familiar, it’s because Apple once tried something similar with Siri. When Apple launched “App Intents,” the idea was that Siri could understand what you wanted (“Order food,” “Book a cab”) and call the right app to do it.

It was clever - but limited. Siri only worked on Apple devices, and intent recognition was narrow and rule-based. You had to say the right phrase in the right way. Most developers didn’t bother to integrate. During the official announcement of Apple Intelligence, they even highlighted how their on-device foundational model could use app intents exposed by iOS apps to help users get more done just by talking to Siri.

OpenAI’s version is much more ambitious.

• It works across web, mobile, and desktop.

• It’s powered by LLMs, which can flexibly interpret user requests.

• And it has no ecosystem boundary - any developer can build an app.

Where Siri was locked to iOS, ChatGPT’s platform lives wherever people chat. But this also means it faces a scaling challenge Apple never solved: how to make sure developers actually want to integrate - and how to help users find the right app in a world where thousands might exist.

3. Who Benefits (and Who Doesn’t)

Not every developer or app will want to play in this ecosystem.

Apps that make money by selling something - e-commerce, travel, productivity, payments - will love it. If a user books a flight or orders lunch through ChatGPT, the transaction still flows to them. They just gained a new distribution channel.

But apps that make money by selling attention - news sites, social media, ad-driven portals - will hesitate. If ChatGPT summarizes their content or answers the question directly (which it does already!), users never visit their site. And if they don’t control the surface where attention lives, they can’t monetize it.

So, while OpenAI might later introduce some revenue sharing, the logic still favors transactional apps over content apps.

That reveals something deeper about the direction of the web itself > the attention economy is starting to fade into the execution economy. Where once the goal was to capture eyeballs, the new goal is to fulfill intent. Cue > 2025 - the year of Agents

4. The Power (and Risk) of Platform Control

If ChatGPT becomes the universal interface for getting things done, OpenAI sits at the center of that ecosystem — just as Google once sat at the center of the web.

That means OpenAI will control:

• Discovery (which apps are shown/selected by users)

• Pricing (how developers get compensated, in non-transaction use-cases)

• Data access (who gets to integrate and how deeply)

In other words, OpenAI becomes the new intermediary - the “operating system” for the web’s next layer.

This is powerful but risky. Developers may love the reach but fear the dependency. We’ve seen this movie before: websites optimized for Google search, apps lived and died by Apple’s App Store policies, and now developers might find themselves optimizing for ChatGPT’s algorithms and rankings.

At scale, this could attract both massive innovation and regulatory attention - because whoever controls the assistant controls the digital economy.

5. The New Internet: From Reading to Doing

All of this leads to a philosophical shift about what’s valuable online.

In the old web, information had value and people paid with their attention, which was monetized by ads. In the new web, information is easy to get inside the LLM apps - instantly synthesized by AI. What’s valuable now is action - the ability to actually do something on your behalf.

That changes the hierarchy of value:

• Knowledge becomes free (summaries, facts, explanations).

• Execution becomes premium (bookings, purchases, transactions).

• Trust becomes the differentiator (which app the assistant chooses).

Conclusion: The Browser Reborn as an Assistant

Every major platform shift in computing has come from simplifying how people interact with information:

• The browser made the web clickable.

• The smartphone made it touchable.

• The assistant now makes it talkable

The OpenAI Apps SDK is the next step in that evolution. It turns conversation into the new interface of the internet. It merges search, intent, and execution into one fluid experience. And it signals that the next wave of competition won’t be about who has the best website or the most users - but who owns the context in which people think, ask, and act.

Just like the browser became the front door of the web, ChatGPT is becoming the front door of human intent. And through that door, a whole new internet might be about to emerge.