ChatGPT app for iOS
openai.com
openai.com
Case in point, the App Store release app subtitle is "The official app by OpenAI"
Update:
“We're starting our rollout in the US and will expand to additional countries in the coming weeks”
source: I used to do tech support for my family
They probably just want to fight abuse/spam/fraud/scams that are on the App Store/Play store so that it would stop devaluing their brand. "ChatGPT charged my card $299 without permission, I am going to the press!" is a disaster waiting to happen with these scammy apps.
It is different from developers who are using the ChatGPT API to build apps.
Also, the signup process is far from easy. People here often cry about how "difficult" it is to sign up for Mastodon or Matrix etc and that is why the mainstream don't use it. Yet this is the same :)
That said, it's possible to package progressive web apps (PWAs) for listing in app stores: PWABuilder[0].
Disclaimer: I've worked on PWABuilder.
My understanding is that this might have been what Apple originally planned to do. However, the popularity of the App Store, IAP revenue, and the focus on services disincentivized them from pushing this route further.
But its for our security to have a closed ecosyste---Walled Garden. Woah there, almost didn't stick to the marketing that we were all taught.
So, on what ground do you suggest they should be blocked from submission? Slapping a custom UI on a third party API is fine, if a bit distasteful in certain situations. Tons of people on this very forum work on glorified wrappers.
Very many did that or implied an association with OpenAI, which is why OpenAI had to release updated branding guidelines (https://openai.com/brand) and started enforcing takedowns against apps/domains using GPT in their name.
I recall about a month of Show HN being largely populated by this same soft of thing. I'm definitely not arguing with misrepresentation of an official OpenAI app but there's a lot of this happening inside and outside the app store.
You just referred to these things as ‘chat apps’.
And that seems reasonable - they use a chat interface.
But they aren’t ‘chat apps’ as we would have understood them a few months ago. They don’t let you chat with people. They let you chat with an LLM.
Is the word ‘chat’ changing its meaning?
Judging by the number of recently-launched apps that invite the user to "chat with PDFs" or "chat with documents", it would appear so.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/fake-chatgpt-apps-raking-tho...
The Chart: https://i.imgur.com/IYC0Pcb.png
Is Apple going to get their cut from the paying customers of OpenAI, by the way?
15%. The only companies that pay 30% are the ones earning over a million dollars a year from things other than long-term subscriptions.
> If your proceeds surpass the 1 million USD threshold in the current calendar year, you will no longer be eligible for the program and the standard commission rate will apply to your future sales.
Source: I did it myself two months ago, no problem.
No plugins right now in the App, but they’ll be coming, no?
3.1.3(b) Multiplatform Services: Apps that operate across multiple platforms may allow users to access content, subscriptions, or features they have acquired in your app on other platforms or your web site, including consumable items in multi-platform games, provided those items are also available as in-app purchases within the app.
Where are you getting this data from? How would any one site know the revenue numbers of multiple competing apps like that, with any degree of confidence?
this is analytics service like appannie (data.ai), sensor tower etc. they plug into apps analytics and collect data for a lot of apps, extrapolating the collected data on all other apps. usually both revenue numbers and downloads are pretty spot on
They say in the post they'll roll it out to other countries in the coming weeks.
Noted the name of the app ("Openai ChatGP") and the description ("The official app by OpenAI")
I opened App Store on my iPhone and typed the name of the app, verbatim.
The official/correct app was not in the first 20 entries (which is as far as I was willing to scroll).
Which, to me:
1. Shows why an official app is needed even though the web version works perfectly fine on iPhone and is probably easier
2. Doesn't actually seem to solve the problem
3. Puts to shame all the touted benefits of a "walled garden/closed ecosystem".
Not that HN wants to admit it when gpt4all gpt4free etc comes up
[0] https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx...
They're omitting the detail that ISPs are violating the spec.
If you set your DNS TTL to 3600 seconds, a caching resolver should store both that and when they received the response. Then, when another client requests the same name in 30 seconds, it should pull the result out of the cache and send it to the client with a TTL of 3570 seconds. This way, once 3600 second pass from the authoritative query, all the cached data is expired everywhere. If you know you're about to make a change you can lower the TTL to 300 seconds an hour before you make the change, after which the change should only take 5 minutes to propagate.
Some ISPs ignore the TTL and tell all their clients that they can cache the result for 72 hours so the clients don't make as many queries to their DNS servers. If you find your ISP doing this, stop using their DNS servers (or stop using that ISP) because it can obviously cause you problems whenever anyone changes a DNS entry and your ISP is handing out a stale one for you to cache for days. Maybe just never use your ISP's DNS servers in general.
Establishing popularity at a point in time requires a window of time.
If I had to guess, they pick a window of a few days because if you did it every minute or even every hour, there might be wild fluctuation in the long tail of apps, depending on whether 8 or 0 people happened to download it in that time.
You could fix this by making window size inversely proportional to short-term popularity and running every 15 min, but that's just more effort to reason about and code and debug. It seems like something they absolutely should do, but I can see why it would be pushed down the backlog.
All of their services that are network heavy (TV, iCloud, Apple Music, News, Safari Sync) are so slow and do huge full reloads of every bit of state, so you just constantly see loading spinners, or worse in iCloud, you see nothing and eventually it will pop all the new stuff in to view, with no way to force a refresh.
I get that CAP theorem exists, but other providers at least seems to understand opportunistic sync and do a job of making it work for the user, but Apple seems to think that inconsistent views over data can't be helped and that every user should understand eventual consistency.
Their SDKs for syncing data to iCloud have long been a joke in the developer community and I think there have been 3 attempts at getting CoreData -> iCloud working, with the last iteration NSPersistentCloudKitContainer often being used as the [butt of jokes, a case study on poor networking talent at Apple] among iOS developers.
It won't show in search results, no matter how many pages you scroll through.
To Apple, the benefit is enormous. What happens when garbage apps get better ranking? Companies pay for that sponsored position. Once they do, Apple then starts ranking them better and gets to claim they "monitor quality" when it was never about quality on the App Store.
Agreed that an official app is needed, clearly.
> 2. Doesn't actually seem to solve the problem
For now. Eventually it'll get sorted.
> 3. Puts to shame all the touted benefits of a "walled garden/closed ecosystem".
Despite having the same experience, I disagree with your conclusion.
It has nothing do with the "walled garden" and everything to do with Apple and OpenAI not paying attention to a rapidly emerging use case. The problem arose because OpenAI did not prioritize the initiative to make their own early enough, allowing hundreds of other developers to fill the void and muddy the waters, while Apple allowed these copycats into the App Store without really considering the customer experience.
And what is Apple supposed to do in this case? Block independent devs from submitting valid apps? Then they’d be blamed for supporting big corp and monopolistic practices. Damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
* Apple is positioning their tight control over the appstore, including high fees to developers and restricted choice to consumers, as providing benefits of a curated & safe experience
* Do we feel that dozens of apps overlaying OpenAI ChatGPT, with various degrees of honesty and deception and monetization methods and privacy policies, are in-line with stated goals of the appstore, and with desires and best interests of the end-users?
My personal impression is "No". This is not to say I want the app store controlled more tightly - on the contrary; I am saying that I am not receiving benefits of the "walled garden / ecosystem" (and this is hardly the first example since iPhone was forced upon me by my employer:), i.e. I do not feel materially safer on AppleStore than I do on Google Play store; but I do feel materially obstructed/impacted when I want to install something that Apple for whatever reason does not.
Or in other words, without claiming anybody did anything particularly wrong here, if you're GOING to allow dozens of apps pretending to be the hottest new thing on the market on the app store, then just get out of my way and let me install what I want without pretense of curation and safety.
Let’s not pretend that it’s hurting the little developer.
It came out in the Epic trial that 80%+ of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases of play to win games.
The biggest players that aren’t games like Netflix, Spotify and other “reader apps” [sic] have forced you to do subscriptions outside of the app store for years.
Then other apps are physical goods where you don’t have to use in app purchases and they can use Apple Pay (regular credit card processing fees).
Or how about search a pdf on my phone? Really? I can’t? Huh… so random…
Open it in iBooks, which also runs ocr on the pdf, and hit the magnifying glass.
* Let me put the icon where I want it. seriously. if my OCD wants this icon on bottom right of my screen, let me!
* Let me have an icon in multiple places. if my OCD wants this app in both "Media" and "Entertainment" folder, let me!
* Allow me to put stuff onto the phone. Via USB. Like every other god damn device in the world.
* Allow me to take stuff off my phone. Via USB. Like very other freakin' device in the world.
(my wife knows the exact shriek that comes out of my home office every ~6months when I try to take all my photos off my iPhone or put some videos onto it for travel. I've given up every time. My co-workers who love iPhone always have a wonderful system that sounds like "Email it to yourself then FTP it to your dropbox account and then download it in the browser and then..... - I assume that's how XKCD got the idea https://xkcd.com/763/)
* Downloading and opening files is an incredible hit and miss of what happens where and how.
* 3.5mm. And yes I blame Apple for starting the trend :)
I have a list somewhere I wrote down when people ask me why my phone is called "iHateApple". I'll see if I can dig it up :)
You need to use iTunes. There’s a file transfer tab somewhere. Or wait, it’s Finder now. They took the syncing out of iTunes. It’s also not called iTunes anymore I just realized. Ok, I’m old. :p
It’s the right call to make.
It keeps logging me out, the copying UX is subpar… And god forbid I lock my phone while I'm getting a completion back. It stops mid sentence and there is no way to continue with it. Which (locking one's phone for a bit while interacting with it) is a very valid use case if you are doing stuff with your hands and want to put the phone in your pocket for a bit.
I'm looking forward to the app.
But I see that perhaps the parent didn't mean to say that the web version can do everything the app does, so I have edited my comment to be less confrontational. Thanks.
"Perfectly Fine" on the other hand, the key word is "fine". It is "eh. It mostly does the job. I cannot begrudge it too much. I have bigger things to rant about. It's perfectly fine."
"Fine" is like "Nice". It's fine. It's nice. Note quite "Good", let alone "Amazing". But it's fine. Perfectly so :)
(I empathize with all of your pain points, particularly the stopping of generation if my screen locks. I have employer-mandated iPhone which has draconian locking policies which are pretty close to average time of query generation. I wonder if app will have the same issue?)
(I’m not a native speaker.)
I best equated it to "usable" since I agree it's "not quite good".
Apple store search is a broken horrific joke.
I imagine this is their MVP, and they're going to iterate and start adding more iOS specific stuff. It'd be nice to be able to hook it into Siri natively (since we can't just rip out Siri and replace it with ChatGPT).
It just further weakens Apple’s arguments for their locked down store and app review process.
How does anyone (outside HN perhaps) have any hope of finding the official one?
And what are we (Apple users) paying our “Apple tax” for when the app store quality control processes have sunk so low?
Lack of competition. If Android counts as competition then switch to Android.
Easy. Out of all the ChatGPT wrapper clones on the App Store, Apple will promote OpenAI's app first, and remove the fakes if they wanted to. Only a selected few 'approved' competitor AI chatbot apps on the App Store will be still around.
This just shows that almost none of these AI chatbot apps have a moat and can be easily wiped out with a push of a red button, even if they are using the GPT-4 API.
I have used this many times for country specific public transport or delivery apps but same thing works here. You do not lose access to other apps, sync features or subscriptions.
Go into the App Store app, not your phone settings, click your profile and scroll all the way down to log out. Then log in with a US account, download the app and switch again.
You can continue using the US only apps after switching back
Works fine for me though. I have barely any apps that need updating
Somehow, I believe you put yourself in that situation and it's not generally applicable to most people who don't use private browsing mode as the default one.
Seriously?
When is this idiotic corporate idea going to die? Internet has no regions.
(BTW, I pay for ChatGPT plus)
But now I see this kind of crap from companies pretending to be at the forefront of technology and it has me not just frustrated, but worried.
Do people at OpenAI realize how much bad will this kind of segregation causes? Because make no mistake, this is segregation: you divide your users into "better" ones and "worse" ones.
"We take reports of fraudulent behavior very seriously. Please provide the following so we can investigate the situation:
Steps to reproduce the behavior: Screenshots of the behavior on the iTunes Store or App Store: Names and links to the Apps:
After we receive this information, our team will investigate your concern."
Am I supposed to provide unpaid work for a $2 trillion company?
Also, worth mentioning the "tracking" of the "official" app:
The following data may be collected and linked to your identity: Contact Info Identifiers Diagnostics User Content Usage Data
Thanks, but no thanks!
Disclosure: I developed an iOS app that uses the OpenAI API, but somehow managed to not include any tracking.
AKME is free and doesn't include any tracking. The app supports a BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) model, as well as buying in-app tokens https://apps.apple.com/app/akme-ai-knowledge/id6446436196
Just because OpenAI didn't make an app first doesn't mean they're the only ones that can create apps for interfacing with GPT networks.
Yes, there are multiple scam apps
For example, one of the apps from the article claims to use 'GPT-4' and they actually do call the OpenAI API, but use the GPT-3.5 model.
Another app that also claims to use GPT-4, actually uses a different (self-hosted?) LLM.
In my opinion, this is a scam - a fraudulent attempt to make a quick profit.
Define scam
And really (really!) happy it's fixed, especially since I still don't know what might have caused it (I haven't made any changes and there's been no app update since v1.1).
From what I can see, this app lags behind their web interface a bit, and I wouldn't be surprised if they had some approval trouble at Apple and will be rolling out updates more frequently now that the official app is out the door. As it stands, the voice transcription feature returns an API error and it doesn't seem to have any option to read the response to you with text to speech.
I'm hopeful to see what updates they roll out in the coming weeks
Edit: I am using this one https://github.com/Yue-Yang/ChatGPT-Siri
Plus, OpenAI has the link on their site, which will bolster the couple days initial release traffic.
Why wouldn't they do that?
It's only bad for everyone that instead there's this total shitshow litany of garbage presented to the user instead. It's bad for customers, bad for the app suppliers, and bad for Apple themselves. Totally bizarre.
That been said, Bing-App is pretty good so far, waiting to look at openAI one. Far too many fake ones masquerading as chatGPT apps and it is really painful to see my friends paying for some of these fake ones to remove adverts and trying to figure out how to make it do things.
I'd guess it includes additional tracking enabled by an app and other undesirable aspects of an app.
But it does do a LOT of haptic.
- snappier
- search through conversation history via title search
- whisper built in for record -> transcribe workflow (does not work "live" unfortunately)
- easier to scroll through history and delete history
- long press prompt or response to copy/select text or perform voting/regeneration actions
- better text resizing support (via the control center's Aa text resize option) (online resizing text made things way too cluttered)
Probably more but all I've found from about 10 minutes of playing around.
Definitely better UX from my perspective!
How is this any better that Apple's built in dictation?
> easier to ... delete history
This is actually the one advantage I see to this app. Deleting history on the desktop is a pain and requires far too many clicks. I can delete history more quickly with the iOS app.
It now looks like the short term ChatGPT copycat grifter apps on the App Store are now going to start packing their bags now. If they don't, Apple will do it for them.
Expect this one to take over the app store and remain the top 10 apps for a very long time.
Here's to hoping it doesn't log you out constantly like the web app.
FFS, I'm a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, but I can't get the app. Why would they even restrict this?
The phone number isn't ever used again and is just used to limit automated signups as far as I can tell.
That said, I also find it somewhat unfair, as likely does anyone not in the US :)
- literally impossible to find on the App store, even when searched for by its exact name caps and all; only able to get it by navigating from OpenAI page
- weekend-project level UX
- no access to my Beta plugins or browsing
My conclusion:
This is a placeholder, not a product.
If you can't find it by the title, that's an App Store issue, not a product issue.
Btw is there anyway to export or do quick copy paste over long conversation? Seems like not possible to easily scroll and select the whole convo.
I can switch stores but would need to cancel subscriptions.
Chat history on the mobile app took a while to sync. In the time it synced, I asked ChatGPT is history is synced across devices. It said: (paraphrasing) "History is separate from the app and desktop, due to privacy considerations and the way the system was designed"
I see my history now after 5 minutes of waiting on the app
- Go to OpenAi's website and then click the link which re-directed me to the App Store
- Not available in your country!
Seriously?
https://pypi.org/project/chatgpt-bot/
I can probably publish the code somewhere, if you're interested.
Yes, no pressure, but if you feel like it, that would be great :)
(also transcription API call is bugged AF right now)
But you can also turn on Voice Control and type with your voice without using Open AI - iOS dictation is getting better but not quite on par with Whisper by any stretch.
It says it syncs between devices. Is it E2E sync, which is kind of table-stakes for the iOS ecosystem at this point?
I wasn't sure, since people are complaining that it makes their phones hot, and it's only a matter of time before this stuff runs locally.
I guess that answers my question, though.
It has more features like selecting GPT-4 sub-models with browsing, plugins, etc...
Kudos to the responsive CSS
Well yeah, if you have early access to those features. Most do not.
Seems like they'd need one to build this app so it would be nice for them to release it to the broader dev community.
* Find new artists to listen that combine techno with psytrance
* Navigate a tricky personal communication situation
* Debug a LOT of different issues
* Write new code in a language I'm not really familiar with
* Explore political ideas through simulated debate
* Search current visa requirements
* Find answers to some random history questions
* Calculate whether my tent would be blown of a mountain cliff or not
* Adjust a recipe to my taste, amount of servings and available ingridients
* Name some very abstract variables
* Remember a name of historical figure
Sure, I could do most of these just with Google, but it would take me a lot more time. Sometimes 2, sometimes 10 times more.
Can't wait when this app will be available in my region.
Curious what you mean by this?
This week I used ChatGPT to help “diagnose” a medical issue my senior dog has developed with his eye. We noticed he very suddenly started walking into furniture, and his left eye has become sunken and half covered by his third eyelid. Our small town’s farm vet wasn’t equipped to deal with eye issues, and the second vet we saw was understaffed so they had a traveling vet in for the day look at our dog. We weren’t impressed after he couldn’t figure out how to work his eye examination tool (he was looking through it backwards at first, shining the light into his own eye) and then gave up and just prescribed an antibiotic/ointment to our dog and told us to come back in a week.
Obviously we’ve tried to google the symptoms, but I’d heard anecdotes of people feeding their own medical issues into ChatGPT and getting good feedback, so I figured I’d do the same with my dog. It gave me a ton of detailed data about five different things that could be causing the problem with his eye. I questioned it about each one, and it tried to rule out some of the causes to the best of its ability when I was able to fill in details about things it asked. All the while it cautioned me that a vet would need to test him to truly determine if one of these things were the problem.
We’re heading back to the vet tomorrow for his recheck, ready to ask about a couple of these things. I’ve been very bearish on ChatGPT and LLMs, but it’s been genuinely useful to me in this situation.
I’m still a little cautious about the info it gave me though, because I’m still thinking about all the times I’ve played with it and had it give me broken lua/f# code or kusto queries that call functions which simply don’t exist. This could easily be one of those situations where I’m not a veterinarian so I can’t easily spot any of the wrong or misinformed information it gave me.
Edit: the five conditions it listed that could have caused the sudden eye problem for my dog are entropion; ectropion; enophthalmos; glaucoma; trauma.
And just a couple of days ago they released the version with web search, and now I always ask it to search for information instead of trying to remember it, or at least to search to confirm that it remembers things right.
Sadly, search seems pretty unstable for now. But it's still a completely unique, once in a lifetime technology. I can't compare it to anything less than internet in terms of potential impact.
Diagnosis is probably going to be one of the most impactful uses. Even if then you have to head to an actual doctor to confirm, it's good to have a possible lead.
We've been using Google for the same purpose for a decade but with much worse results, this is a step up.
But I have Android anyway.. Hopefully that will come too!
But I heard it's a thing (probably read about it here): https://www.tomsguide.com/news/chatgpt-is-now-being-used-by-...
Minor annoyances after trying it out for a few minutes: 1) The app requires you to sign up for conversations longer than 5 exchanges. 2) It disables my keyboard's word suggestions and instead forces its own – English – word suggestions upon me, making it very hard to write in e.g. Spanish. 3) Even typing in English is weirdly difficult – there is some lag and no autocorrection. 4) The text-to-speech and speech-to-text algorithm only supports English.
But hey, better than nothing.
I might be alone in this, but we've been trained for vibrations to mean something. Vibrating the phone on every line or response from ChatGPT seems excessive to me (and a battery drain as well!).
Everything else has “Sounds” as off which turns off vibrations as well.
I turned off haptics immediately in settings, but most people will be complaining before they figure that out.
It is annoying enough the way that ChatGPT drips out results, but now it acts as a low-quality hand massager and battery drain too?
Not ideal, but the product is still very good and people will happily use it, regardless of these "extra features"
[0] https://bilderbergmeetings.org/meetings/meeting-2023/partici...
(I say this as someone who resisted making an app for AutoTempest for years based on the same logic, but finally caved to the fact that a lot of people just prefer them. Something I'm now coming to understand as I wait eagerly for a ChatGPT app...)
Normalize people using the web. And FirefoxAndroid... don't refresh an idle tab unless I tell you to!
I think that happened to me a while back, but I haven't had a problem with it in weeks.
Poe necessitates a yearly commitment. As a consequence, if the costs of GPT-4 decrease significantly or a more advanced model becomes available, there is a potential risk of paying for Poe and not using it. Poe does offer access to Claude base model and limited access to the more advanced Claude models.
Edit: Oh ok you mean the app, I thought you meant ChatGPT in general because Italy banned it for a bit.
I think it will come soon, when I had an app in the store and I added a country it also didn't appear straight away.
I'm getting a good chuckle out of this.
The thought-leaders have been warning us that large language models will put 99% of professionals out of work and will threaten the nature of human existence... and yet today's leading LLM apparently can't be used to generate code for a boilerplate user interface using the Android SDK.
-> The thing was released like two months ago, think what LLMs will do in like 10 years.
-> They likely want an industrial scale indestructible app for their multi-million $ product, they can take at least three months to build it.
Especially considering GPT-4 was, allegedly, complete by August 2022. If it doesn't even enable 2x or 3x the output after a half year of familiarization then I think it's a lot harder to use for businesses then commonly suggested.
OpenAI are supposed to be saving the world after all
Ridiculous would be for me to take your dreams for granted, and ignore the evident reality that is right in front of me.
Also, there are reasons to not launch on both platforms at once even if the binaries were ready. E.g. if you want to space out onboarding new users. They are launching only in the US afterall.
To me actually the parent comment seems like bait - boiling down to "GPT is incapable, otherwise OpenAI would use it to generate the Android app along with the iOS app".
Apologies, I should have written my comment in a better way.
Still, other readers would make the same assumption so it's best to avoid that notation in HN comments in the future.
Apparently not all of the code.
Ironically, ChatGPT is very good at that.
Pure laziness.