MapQuest is having its best week in 30 years, and it has a Great Lake to thank. The original web mapping service hit No. 1 among navigation apps and No. 8 among all free apps in the U.S. Apple App Store, plus No. 2 overall in Canada’s App Store, as of Sunday night, the highest chart position in the brand’s history. Hundreds of thousands of downloads have come in since Thursday, and usage is running roughly 50 times its normal rate.
The surge traces to President Donald Trump’s executive order on Thursday renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” signed amid the ongoing trade dispute between the United States and Canada. Google Maps followed on Saturday, switching the label to “Lake America” for U.S. users while keeping “Lake Ontario” for Canadian users and showing both names everywhere else, citing the update to the federal Geographic Names Information System. MapQuest went the other way and kept the historical, familiar names for lakes and gulfs on its maps.
For anyone who wants to weigh in, the company also relaunched its rename-it-yourself tool at gulfof.mapquest.com/lakeontario. MapQuest first built it in February 2025 for the Gulf of Mexico and expanded it this week to cover Lake Ontario.
“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 Doug Berger, general manager of MapQuest. “Hundreds of thousands of people signaled to us this weekend that we got it right, by downloading our app.”
The practical upshot for advisors with clients bound for Toronto, Niagara, or the Thousand Islands: The name on the map now depends on which app is open and which side of the border the phone is on. MapQuest, which launched in 1996 and counts tens of millions of monthly users, is free on iOS and Android.
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