MCP Apps are Live! Build Once, Deploy in ChatGPT & Claude, Access a Billion-User Market.

Hey builders,

Build one app. Deploy it inside ChatGPT AND Claude. Reach over a billion users.

That just became possible with Anthropic launching MCP Apps, using the exact same open standard as ChatGPT's App Store. Same protocol. Same app. Two massive ecosystems with a single build.

Major companies like Statista are already moving on this. I was at their HQ a few weeks ago presenting on exactly this shift. More on that below.

What just happened

Anthropic went live with MCP Apps inside Claude. Major launch partners are already in there - Slack, Figma, Asana, Amplitude, Canva, Clay, monday.com, Salesforce. These aren't just text-based integrations. They bring full, rich, interactive UI directly inside the Claude chat window.

To find them:

• Settings

• Connectors

• Browse Connectors

Take Clay as an example. You can ask Claude for a market analysis of a company, and Clay delivers enriched data with its own visual interface - tables, charts, everything - without ever leaving Claude. That's a massive upgrade from the old MCP experience where you'd get raw text and Claude would try to figure out how to display it.

One of my favourites is Excalidraw - a very well executed app that gives a clear use case for when you need UI inside the chatbot.

The main takeaway here is that increasingly, AI is becoming the operating system.

Why go to 12 different tools when you can just prompt what you need from one command window?

Companies are preparing for the Intent-Based Web

A few weeks ago I was at Statista's HQ in Hamburg, invited by their CTO Ingo Schellhammer to present to their product and tech teams on the Intent-Based Web and building MCP Apps - how discovery is shifting from search bars and app stores to conversations, and why companies need to be building for this now.

We covered:

→ Why "searching for apps" feels increasingly broken
→ How conversational AI changes the discovery layer
→ How to design applications for the intent-based web

Statista is already ahead of the curve. They've got their MCP live in Perplexity, Copilot, and Langdock, and are now expanding to more LLMs.

That's the kind of move that separates the companies who capture this distribution shift from those who get left behind.

How MCP Apps actually work - and why it's a big deal

Here's the critical thing: both ChatGPT and Claude Apps are built on MCP (Model Context Protocol), the open standard Anthropic released for connecting tools to AI.

MCP Apps is an extension of that protocol - pioneered by Liad Yosef and Ido Salomon - that lets MCP servers deliver visual, interactive interfaces inside any AI product that supports the standard.

What that means for companies:

→ Build one MCP App
→ Deploy it inside ChatGPT (850M+ consumer users)
→ Deploy it inside Claude (30M+ MAU, rapidly growing enterprise audience)
→ Deploy it inside any AI product adopting the protocol - VS Code, Goose, and rumours of Google DeepMind support coming

Anyone from the mobile app space will understand why this is significant.

You don't need to build separate apps for Apple and Android. One app. Everywhere. Combined, you're looking at access to over a billion users with a single build.

MCP Apps are one of the best ways for companies to unlock AI distribution.

I built a MCP App with Fractal in 20 minutes

To show how accessible this is, I built, tested, and submitted a Stock Picker app end-to-end using Fractal (basically Lovable but for MCP Apps — completely no code).

The high-level process:

→ I chose to build a Stock Picker App - gave it a brief idea and answered a few planning questions
→ It generated a full spec with tools for stock quotes, watchlists, price history, and news
→ It found a free API, built the entire app, and let me test it inside Fractal's preview
→ Hit deploy, tested live in ChatGPT, and it auto-generated the full App Store submission package

20 minutes. One app. Ready for both ChatGPT and Claude.

I recorded the whole thing end-to-end - full video is here:

If you want to build with Fractal, they have a 20% off discount code you can use here.

Staying on top of what's happening

Things are moving fast across both ecosystems. If you want to keep track of which companies are launching apps, what strategies they're using, and how the landscape is evolving, we're tracking all of it publicly at appdiscoverability.com/track.

We've also just released new data on the ChatGPT App Store - including breakdowns of the strategies companies are using around auth/no auth and the number of tools.

Some of the latest apps to be released today and over the last few days below.

You can sign up here to get the updates daily or weekly.

If anyone has any questions around MCP Apps, just reply to this email, I check every reply!

Speak soon,

Elliot

Learn how your business could grow with Apps on ChatGPT & Claude

If your company or brand is interested in getting an app inside ChatGPT & Claude, feel free to schedule with our team to discuss what the opportunity could mean for your business.

Please book a strategy call with our team below.