What arrived
Overnight on Oct 8–9, 2026, listings without a creation date appeared in ChatGPT's directory in two waves, 140 and then 270, in our listing sample. Across Oct 8 and 9 as a whole, 418 of those listings went live, so the batch is almost all of those two days. Store-wide, our Oct 13 analysis counted 1,117.
408 of the 410 in our listing sample carry the plugins_ id prefix rather than the Apps SDK's plugin_asdk_app_. That family now counts 899 listings in the whole directory, against 5,609 Apps SDK apps. Examples from the batch: GigaMail, Relationship Reply Coach, NVIDIA BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, Seq2Music and Authorised OSINT Toolkit.
How we know they are old
A ChatGPT id ends in 32 hex characters, and the first 8 of them are the creation time in Unix seconds. For the 1,072 Apps SDK apps in our listing sample that carry a creation date (the store's launched_at field), the decoded time matches it in every case, so it is safe to read. Decoding the batch gives creation dates from September 12, 2025 to October 3, 2026. The median listing was created 50 days before it appeared, and none was created after it appeared.
Apps created months earlier and published on the same night are a migration, not a launch wave. Whatever moved them, the listings existed before Oct 8 and became visible together.
Where they landed
In our listing sample, the batch is concentrated in two categories: Productivity (160) and Developer Tools (115). Together they hold 67% of it. Most arrivals landed far down their lists: only 24 of the 410 appear in any top-100 list we store.
What it did to ranks
On Oct 9 the top of Popular also changed, though not because of the batch. OpenAI's own Google Drive app went from #49 to #2 in Popular and from #653 to #1 in Productivity. Every app below its new position moved down one place: 17 of the 18 other apps whose history we store slid exactly one place at that moment.
CanvaHubSpotAsanaAirtableGoogle Drive
Neither Canva nor HubSpot did anything that night. A raw rank reads their one-place slide as a decline; cohort rank, which compares an app only with apps listed at both points, reads it as no change. Lower in the lists, where the batch listings landed, the same thing happened at scale: hundreds of insertions pushed established apps down without any of them changing.
How OpenApps handles it
- The batch is left out of went-live counts, so the two days don't read as hundreds of new apps. It is also left out of the launch lag, because its appearance date is a migration date, not a go-live.
- Every change column uses cohort rank, so insertions don't show as falls.
Method and limits
A listing counts as part of the batch when it has no creation date and appeared overnight on Oct 8–9, 2026. Apps SDK apps that appeared at the same time carry a creation date and are real go-lives, so they are excluded. Counts come from our listing sample; the full store holds more batch listings than the sample. In our Oct 13 analysis of the full store, 1,117 ChatGPT listings appeared on Oct 8–9, 894 of them with a plugins_ id. Creation dates come from decoding ids.