OpenAI released an official ChatGPT app for iPhone on 18 May, in the United States only. A week later, announcing the expansion on Twitter, it added eleven countries: Albania, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Jamaica, South Korea, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria and the United Kingdom, with more to follow “in stages”. An Android version is promised “soon”. Bangladesh is not yet on the list.
What the real app does
It is the website in a native wrapper, with three things the browser version lacks: voice input, transcribed by OpenAI’s Whisper model, which handles accented English well; conversation history synced with the web account; and a cleaner interface without the login prompts the mobile site keeps showing. It is free. Subscribers to ChatGPT Plus ($20 a month) get GPT-4, faster responses and early access to new features inside it, and the app respects the same limits as the web version — including its weak Bangla.
The fakes
Because the real app is absent here, a search for “ChatGPT” in Bangladesh’s App Store returns a page of imitations — “AI Chat”, “Chat GBT”, “Genie” — many charging weekly subscriptions of $5–8 for access to what is, at best, OpenAI’s API wrapped in someone else’s app, and at worst nothing. Apple has removed some; more appear. The tells: the developer name on the real app is OpenAI, the icon is the black-and-white hexagonal knot, there is no in-app purchase other than ChatGPT Plus, and it does not ask you to subscribe before you can type. Anything asking for money in the first thirty seconds is not it.
Why the country list looks random
Albania and Jamaica before India and Bangladesh is not a judgment on markets; it reflects where OpenAI has cleared the local requirements — age verification, data-protection rules, payment processing for Plus — and where its servers can carry the extra load. India, Bangladesh and Pakistan are among the largest ChatGPT user bases on the web and will come in a later batch.
Using ChatGPT on a phone today
- Open chat.openai.com in Safari or Chrome and log in.
- Tap Share → Add to Home Screen. The web app then behaves like an installed one, with the same account and history.
- For voice, use the keyboard’s dictation button; iOS dictation supports Bangla, which Whisper in the official app does not yet.
When the official app reaches the Bangladesh store, this site will say so. Until then, do not pay anyone for it.
Why fake apps cluster around a gap
The pattern is predictable enough to be a rule: whenever a well-known app is unavailable in a market, counterfeits appear in that market’s store within days. They take the recognised name and icon, charge a weekly subscription for something that is often just a thin wrapper around a free API, and rely on the fact that a user who cannot find the real one has no reference to compare against.
Two checks defeat almost all of them. Look at the developer name on the listing — the real app is published by OpenAI, not by a studio you have never heard of — and look at the subscription price, because an app charging weekly for a service with a free tier is telling you what it is.
The official app did reach the Bangladesh store later, and a web browser was always a perfectly good way to use the service in the meantime.
Source: Mashable, via Prothom Alo.
