If so, on what grounds could Apple deny them from being on the App Store?
Given the enormous amount of apps using trademarked names in their name or description, I also guess trademark owners cannot request Apple to remove those apps.
What Apple IMO should improve, though, is its search functionality.
For example, when I search for “company name product name” (examples: “Microsoft Excel”, “Apple Numbers”, “Google Maps”), the top hits should be “Microsoft Excel”, “Numbers”, respectively “Google Maps - Transit & Food” (what marketeer came up with that name? To me, that signals “not the real Google Maps”)
So, on what ground do you suggest they should be blocked from submission? Slapping a custom UI on a third party API is fine, if a bit distasteful in certain situations. Tons of people on this very forum work on glorified wrappers.
I recall about a month of Show HN being largely populated by this same soft of thing. I'm definitely not arguing with misrepresentation of an official OpenAI app but there's a lot of this happening inside and outside the app store.
Very many did that or implied an association with OpenAI, which is why OpenAI had to release updated branding guidelines (https://openai.com/brand) and started enforcing takedowns against apps/domains using GPT in their name.
You just referred to these things as ‘chat apps’.
And that seems reasonable - they use a chat interface.
But they aren’t ‘chat apps’ as we would have understood them a few months ago. They don’t let you chat with people. They let you chat with an LLM.
Is the word ‘chat’ changing its meaning?
Judging by the number of recently-launched apps that invite the user to "chat with PDFs" or "chat with documents", it would appear so.
But its for our security to have a closed ecosyste---Walled Garden. Woah there, almost didn't stick to the marketing that we were all taught.