MapQuest is in the spotlight this week after refusing to replace “Lake Ontario” with “Lake America” on its map following an executive order issued last week by US President Donald Trump. As of Monday morning, the MapQuest application is the first free iPhone application in the Apple App Store rankings in Canada and fourth in the equivalent ranking in the United States.
For our younger readers, MapQuest was once a popular service back when printing directions on a sheet of paper was common for road trips, before the advent of smartphones with apps like Google Maps and Apple Maps.
MapQuest offers its own iOS and Android apps, but the company is nowhere near as popular as it once was. So far, at least. MapQuest announced today that hundreds of thousands of people have downloaded its apps since Thursday and said it had seen about a 50-fold increase in usage of its map as of August 30.
The best free iPhone apps in Canada as of August 31“We took the same approach as the Gulf of Mexico: join the conversation and give people an app that keeps the names they know,” MapQuest CEO Doug Berger said in a press release. “Hundreds of thousands of people told us this weekend that we were right, by downloading our app.”
Google Maps now displays the name “Lake America” to US users, but Apple has yet to follow suit.
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