MapQuest Refused to Rename Lake Ontario and Shot to No. 1

MapQuest, a company that bills itself as a “veteran of online mapping,” has refused to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America” on its maps — in defiance of an executive order from President Donald Trump directing the US Department of the Interior to make the change to the federal geographic names service. The decision, announced Thursday, unexpectedly turned into a notable commercial win for the service.

According to the company, over the weekend the app picked up “hundreds of thousands” of new downloads, and its usage climbed to 50 times the normal level. By Monday morning Eastern time, the iOS version had reached fourth place in the overall app rankings (excluding games) of the US App Store, eighth among all apps and games, and first in the navigation category. In the Canadian store, the app rose to second place.

Independent data from analytics firm Sensor Tower confirms the surge: in the week beginning August 24, MapQuest racked up around 184,000 downloads worldwide and 162,000 in the US — more than a tenfold increase over the previous week.

“We did the same thing we did with the Gulf of Mexico: we stay part of the conversation and give people an app where the familiar names are preserved,” said MapQuest general manager Doug Berger. The company also released an online tool that lets users jokingly rename Lake Ontario however they like and share the result on social media — the same bit of fun it had offered a year earlier, after the Gulf of Mexico was renamed the “Gulf of America.”

Trump's decision to rename the body of water on the border with Canada coincided with an escalating trade conflict: after talks collapsed, the US imposed new 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods, and Ottawa is preparing retaliatory measures.

Competitors behaved differently. On Saturday, Google Maps said it was complying with the order because it relies on official government sources — in the US, that is the GNIS geographic names system. The updated name will be shown only to users in the US, while in Canada it will remain Lake Ontario, and outside both countries both versions will appear. As of Monday morning, Apple Maps had not renamed the lake and did not comment on its plans. A year earlier, both services did rename the Gulf of Mexico.

MapQuest, which is about thirty years old, has changed hands more than once over its history: after going public it was bought by AOL, then ended up with Verizon, and in 2019 was sold to advertising company System1. This year the app has been downloaded 687,000 times, with the vast majority of all-time installs coming from the US.

Source: TechCrunch