Research on AI app stores
The Oct 8–9 batch: existing ChatGPT plugins arriving at once
The Oct 8–9 batch was a migration of existing apps, not a day of launches. Overnight on Oct 8–9, 2026, 410 listings appeared in our listing sample (1,117 store-wide in our Oct 13 analysis), 408 with the plugins_ id prefix; their ids date them a median 50 days earlier.
Availability across 48 countries
On October 13, 2026, 1,066 of the 1,136 apps in a US top-100 ChatGPT list (94%) are listed in all 42 countries with data, 32 are listed only in the US, and Ukraine misses the most apps (63). Finance and Healthcare are the least available categories: 85% and 87% of their top 100 are listed everywhere.
Who gets featured on ChatGPT's home page
On October 13, 2026, all 16 shelves on ChatGPT's app home page were unbroken 9-app runs of a list's order: 13 started at #1 and 3 started lower, skipping apps already in Popular's top 6. Only New & Noteworthy and Small Business follow no category list, so they are the two shelves that look hand-picked.
MCP tool design census: 7,777 tools on 425 open servers
Most MCP tools say whether they are read-only, but few say what they return: 91% set readOnlyHint and only 39% declare an output schema. That is across our MCP dataset: the 425 open servers we track across every store, not only the 105 behind ChatGPT and Claude listings, with 7,777 tools on October 13, 2026.
Launch lag: how long ChatGPT apps take to appear
A ChatGPT app appears a median 32.5 days after its id is created (middle half 13.7 to 56.2 days). That is across the 19 apps with a creation date that went live from Oct 7 to Oct 13, in our listing sample, on October 13, 2026.
Claude's kinds and ranks: three lists in one
Claude lists 3,252 plugins, 808 connectors and 132 desktop extensions (October 13, 2026), but its Most popular list ranks 1,157 of them, and in the top 25 of all 29 tag lists that mix kinds, every connector sits above every plugin. Ranks only compare listings of the same kind.