The Mac App Flea Market (blog.jim-nielsen.com)

A quick “AI chat” search in the Mac App Store turns up a parade of look‑alike apps — many with ChatGPT‑style icons and virtually indistinguishable names — even though the official ChatGPT desktop app from OpenAI isn’t in the store at all. The results are essentially every spacing, casing and punctuation permutation of “AI”, “Chat” and “Bot” (and even an “Al Chatbot” typo) you can imagine, which makes the listings feel like a flea market of counterfeit goods. The visual and naming mimicry is so pervasive it’s comical, but it also masks whether apps are legitimate, high‑quality clients or thin wrappers around third‑party LLM APIs. That matters for developers, users and the broader AI community because it highlights weaknesses in app store curation, provenance and discoverability. Spoofed icons and near‑identical names increase the risk of user confusion, privacy issues, and low‑quality or malicious offerings monetizing popular LLMs. Technically, the problem is trivial to execute (icon reuse, minimal UI, misleading metadata) but costly in trust. The situation argues for stronger publisher verification, official badges or model/source disclosure in listings, and clearer policies about branding and provenance so users and serious developers can find authentic, transparent AI apps.