The Mac App Flea Market

2025-09-14

Have you ever searched for “AI chat” in the Mac App Store?

I have. It’s like strolling through one of those counterfeit, replica markets where all the goods look legit at first glance. But then when you look closer, you realize something is off.

For the query “AI chat”, there are so many ChatGPT-like app icons the results are comical. Take a look at these:

The real app icon for the ChatGPT desktop app (from OpenAI) is in that collection above. Can you spot it?

Here they are again in a single image:

A grid of 45 icons. 1 is the real ChatGPT desktop app for Mac from OpenAI. The others are all look-a-likes.

(It’s the one in the 4th row, 3rd column.)

And those are just black-and-white lookalikes. There are other apps riding the AI/OpenAI wave that look like the ChatGPT logo just in different colors.

The funny thing is: the official ChatGPT desktop app from OpenAI is not even in the Mac App Store. It’s only available from their website, so it won’t show up in the “AI chat” results.

There were lots of other “sort of looks like the official one but isn’t” app icons in my search results, like this Claude one, this Grok one, or this Gemini one.

Oh, and these apps’ names were fascinating to look at. They were basically every spacing and casing combination of “AI”, “Chat”, and “Bot” you can image. Just look at this sampling:

I mean, look at this one: they named it “Al Chatbot” (that's the letter l as in “lima”, you can see it better in the URL slug where the letters are lowercase: al-chatbot).

Imagine going to store to grab some Nike gear and you find stuff like this (image courtesy of this post on Reddit):

What does that say about the store you’re visiting?

I always wanted a pair of Mike Jordans, just like I always wanted ChatGPP for my Mac.