Imagine, with a swift stroke of a pen, Lake Ontario becomes Lake America. Google Maps follows suit and changes the name to Lake America for users in the United States, and Apple Maps follows the same path. But the old granddaddy of online maps, one of the pioneers that helped bring digital mapping into the mainstream, says no. MapQuest keeps Lake Ontario.
That might sound like a small thing, but it isn’t. Cartographer and historian J.B. Harley once wrote, “Each map is a manifesto for a set of beliefs about the world.” Maybe that’s why this story feels bigger than a name on a lake. Maps tell us where things are, but they also tell us how somebody wants the world represented.
People started downloading MapQuest because they remembered it. Some may now be discovering that it isn’t quite the MapQuest they remember, either. The service has continued to evolve and has added features that would have seemed pretty impressive to the people who used to print MapQuest directions and throw them on the passenger seat. That doesn’t mean it is suddenly technologically superior to Google Maps or Apple Maps. It isn’t. Google Maps, for example, has far more sophisticated features, including its AI-powered “Ask Maps” and upgraded Immersive Navigation.
But something strange happened here. We have reached a point where a map can divide people. Think about that for a moment. We aren’t talking about a presidential election, a social media platform or a sporting rivalry. We are talking about the name of a lake.
Frank Zappa once joked that there would never be a nuclear war because there was too much real estate involved. Maps are where we draw the lines, give things names and decide what the world is supposed to look like. And here we are, arguing over what to call a lake, with three major mapping services taking different approaches to the same piece of water.
MapQuest didn’t just get a little nostalgic attention. It shot to No. 1 in the U.S. Navigation category and into the top ranks of the overall App Store, while reaching No. 2 overall in Canada’s App Store at one point. MapQuest’s parent company said it had received hundreds of thousands of new downloads and that usage had climbed to about 50 times normal. Independent Sensor Tower data backed up the surge, estimating 162,000 U.S. downloads in the week beginning August 24 and 184,000 worldwide, with both figures more than 10 times the previous week.
That is more than nostalgia. That’s people making a choice, even if some of them may have made that choice for only a few minutes. The interesting question isn’t whether MapQuest can suddenly beat Google Maps or Apple Maps. It can’t. The interesting question is why people who had largely forgotten MapQuest suddenly felt strongly enough about it to download it. Maybe, in the middle of all the noise, some people are looking for a little sanity in an old app.
I see this a little like X versus Bluesky. At some point, are we really choosing a map because we like the map, or because we like what choosing that map says about us? Maybe MapQuest stumbled into something it couldn’t have planned. It didn’t need to build a better map or invent some revolutionary new navigation system. It simply refused to change something that a lot of people didn’t think should be changed.
And people noticed. In a world where almost everything seems to become another argument about which side you’re on, even a map can become a statement. We used to use maps to figure out where we were going. Now, apparently, we can use them to tell everyone where we stand. The lines have been drawn. Which side are you on?
Recommended Reading
- MapQuest’s app surges to No. 1 in Navigation after refusing to rename Lake Ontario — TechCrunch
- Apple Maps changes name of Lake Ontario to ‘Lake America’ — Reuters
- How we’re reimagining Maps with Gemini — Google
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