A few days after putting up a preorder page on Google Play, OpenAI has flipped the switch and released ChatGPT for Android. The app is now live in a handful of countries, such as the U.S., India, Bangladesh and Brazil.
If you live in a country that isn’t part of that list, you can still head over to Google Play and preorder the app as OpenAI plans to release the app in more countries very soon. There will be additional countries over the next week.
And if you have an iPhone, you may already be using the official ChatGPT app, as it has been available on iOS for a while. The Android release is still an important milestone for OpenAI, as there are more Android users than iOS users around the world.
If you are familiar with ChatGPT on the web, you can expect to get similar results from OpenAI’s chatbot. But the interface has been optimized for mobile.
Interacting with ChatGPT works more or less like sending messages to a friend in a messaging app. You can type text at the bottom of the screen and hit send — ChatGPT answers with advice, tips and whatever you need.
The mobile app works with your existing OpenAI account, meaning that you can see your past conversations across all your devices if you have enabled “chat history & training” — you can’t disable one setting without disabling the other.
While you can sign up with a free account, OpenAI also offers an optional subscription to access a better large language model (GPT-4) and additional features. ChatGPT Plus will be available on Android through an in-app purchase as well. If you are already a subscriber, you should be able to access ChatGPT Plus features from Android with your existing subscription.
Update, 7/26/23, 1:40 PM ET: The Android version of ChatGPT is now showing north of 500,000 installs on the Google Play store, reports data.ai.