Is The ChatGPT Mobile App Worth It?

Installing The App

To install the mobile app on your device, go to your device's app store and search for ChatGPT. Make sure to install the app built by OpenAI.

Tip for Android users: the first section of the search results are ads related to your search. You will probably not find it there. Search for a divider after the first results. After this divider, you will find organic results.

Why could the app be needed?

From a business perspective, having an official app could make sense for OpenAI, as app stores already contain chat or AI apps meant to trick users into mistaking it for the official app. So they had to play the app game to keep their users and protect them from malicious developers. If you want some examples, open your app store, whether iOS or Android, and you’ll see for yourself.

A great addition to mobile apps is voice input, which works better on mobile devices out of the gate. Voice recognition generally works better on mobile devices than laptops or desktops because of the hardware and their placement.

Another great perk of using an app is mobility and fast action time. You don’t have to go to your laptop if you get a prompt idea while fixing your coffee or a snack. Just pick up your mobile device, if it isn't already in your hand, and ask away. Cannot type fast enough? Use voice input.

While using the app, you can access your chat history even when offline or when your internet is slow. With the mobile app, chat history is saved locally on your device.

Response times are faster on the app because of the many optimization capabilities developers have at their disposal when building native mobile apps, whether iOS or Android.

Is the app better than the website?

In my experience, mobile apps are better than using a browser. For mobile devices, using the app is usually better in most cases. On a desktop computer or laptop, you can use the browser just fine. Using the browser on mobile can raise a few issues, like latency and random slow loading times, apart from being generally slower.

More and more people are using mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets for work, so having apps optimized for such devices is almost always better.

We found an older tablet in our office and installed the ChatGPT app. It is more performant than using it inside the browser, even if it looks great on both mediums. So, especially for older or lower-spec devices, using the app is more than recommended.

Some users even reported faster response speeds on the app than inside the browser on the same device, but we did not observe such behavior during our testing.

For us, both environments produced similar results in terms of quality and response time, but the application was snappier and did not get sluggish at all when browsing through the chatbot’s output or waiting for a response.