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.
The whole renaming thing is a distraction tactic at best.
I personally am a huge fan of CoMaps. It uses OSM data
Seconding CoMaps.
Completely replaced google maps for me a while back. It works as in-car navigation (with GPS audio queues for when noone else is doing nav), downloading maps is a highlighted feature instead of being burried in menus and it does not live sync to traffic or ask for route changes. It simply does its job and does not ask for your attention after it gets going.
I kind of like the live traffic. I want an open source ‘Waze’. Sadly there isn’t one. Magic earth came close but then they enshittified.
Ok but what if Mitch McConnell became an obsessive OSM contributor months ago and that’s why we have no news?
There’s enough of a non American user base to counter it.
I’ve been using OsmAnd. I tried CoMaps and I found it really clunky. I set it up to try on a drive home from work since I know the route. I put my address in and it brings me to the street somewhere in the city, but not to my address?
Fair enough. Open source software is something that continually improves as it gets into the hands of more people and they all voice their concerns. That’s the whole point. It’s software for people and not corporations.