MapQuest stood up to President Donald Trump, and now its app is reaping the rewards.
The “OG of online mapping,” as the company calls itself, announced on Thursday that it would not change the name of Lake Ontario on its maps to Lake America, despite Trump’s executive order directing the U.S. Department of the Interior to update the lake’s name in the U.S. geographic naming service. As a result, MapQuest’s mobile app downloads soared, sending the iOS app to the No. 4 position on the U.S. App Store’s Top Charts for apps (not including games) as of Monday morning on the U.S. east coast.
MapQuest also reached the No. 8 position overall in the U.S. App Store across both apps and games, and it became the No. 1 Navigation app in the United States.
I was sadly surprised to find out that Kagi maps follwed Trumps lead on misnaming both the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario.
I’m likely to ditch them over this. It’s not just a matter of principal. If I can’t trust them to stand up to Trumps temper tantrums on this, how can I trust that any of their other results haven’t been tampered with?
They pull from MapBox. Also I see lake Ontario on a US IP
It’s interesting that users on the Kagi forums report different answers. It seems that both US and Canadian customers may see either Lake Ontario or Lake America.
That would suggest that pulling from MapBox is orthogonal to the decision of what to show the end user.
Still says Lake Ontario for me when checking from Switzerland.
that is probably playing both sides as much as possible like google does (Lake America if you enter it from US, Ontario otherwise)
Both Lake Ontario and Gulf Of Mexico for me and I’m in the USA.
If it makes you feel better a lot of Canadian and other international services now display it as America because they are cheap and are just all pulling it from the same Google API source.
I wish it did but that doesn’t really help me.
I’d rather a few services are good rather than that every service sinks to lowest level.
Kagi has always given me bad vibes. So I’m not really that surprised over this.