I’m leaving my feedback here, since the AI assistant on help.openai.com couldn’t figure out where feedback for ChatGPT’s desktop app should go. It just kept telling me to use model feedback or jump on OpenAI’s Discord. You’d think the world’s premier AI company could create a top-tier, helpful AI assistant, but apparently not. 
It finally happened. OpenAI finally convinced me to cancel my subscription. I’ve had this subscription since non-API paid accounts were an option, but as of this evening, I’m moving to Anthropic. (Incidentally, I wasn’t prompted for feedback when I canceled my subscription. I was offered a free month, but not asked why I was canceling. Seems like a missed opportunity to understand how you failed your customer, OpenAI.)
Why cancel? Because I naively accepted an update to the ChatGPT desktop app on my macOS laptop. Boy was that a mistake. What the heck is this new ChatGPT desktop app? What product manager approved this piece of ill-conceived garbage and why are they still employed?
I get that OpenAI wants to make things more useful by adding work tasks and making Codex more accessible, but that shouldn’t be done at the expense of the core functionality. In the new app, I can’t ask a simple question and get an answer without pain or feature bloat. Access to anything resembling the old-school chat interface is an afterthought, and I can only see the last couple of chats, but none of my old projects.
OpenAI, tell me you hate the chat feature without telling me you hate the chat feature. Nothing screams, “we want to punish you for using this feature” quite like the new floating chat window with none the features or options previously found in chat. God forbid I want to ask ChatGPT a question without starting a new work task! If I insist on chat, my chat has to live in a little floating window and for some reason responses take 30-60 seconds, even when getting a simple answer to a simple question. Then, when the model deigns to respond to my question, why does my phone get a notification? I’m using the desktop app; the floating chat window has primary focus. There’s no need to ping my phone! How obnoxious! Seriously, who thought this was a good design?
After some additional browsing, it seems that there was supposed to be a “ChatGPT Classic” app installed alongside the updated ChatGPT desktop app, but I guess there is a pretty serious bug in the Mac desktop app’s built-in update feature, because no such app exists in /Applications or any other folder on my Mac. I’ve seen tons of similar complaints on other sites from baffled users. Ironically, this all could have been avoided if OpenAI allowed us to re-download the ChatGPT Classic app, but that wasn’t an option. At least, it wasn’t an option according to the AI assistant on help.openai.com. It insisted that the ChatGPT Classic app should just be there after the update.
OpenAI bungled this one pretty hard. Besides me, I wonder how many other loyal subscribers they lost?