MapQuest is in the spotlight this week after refusing to change “Lake Ontario” to “Lake America” on its map following an executive order issued by U.S. President Donald Trump last week. As of Monday morning, the MapQuest app is the top free iPhone app on Apple’s App Store charts in Canada and fourth on the equivalent U.S. chart.
For our younger readers, MapQuest was once a popular service back in the days when printing out directions on a sheet of paper was common for road trips, before the arrival of smartphones with apps like Google Maps and Apple Maps.
MapQuest does offer its own iOS and Android apps, but the company is nowhere near as popular as it once was. Until now, at least. MapQuest today announced that hundreds of thousands of people have downloaded its apps since Thursday, and it said it was seeing roughly a 50× increase in usage of its map as of August 30.
The top free iPhone apps in Canada as of August 31“We took the same approach we did with the Gulf of Mexico: be part of the conversation, and give people an app that keeps the names they’re familiar with,” said MapQuest general manager Doug Berger, in a press release. “Hundreds of thousands of people signaled to us this weekend that we got it right, by downloading our app.”
Google Maps is now showing the “Lake America” name to U.S. users, but Apple has yet to follow.
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