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.
Now that you mention it, I have family in the Bay Area and had an incident with them too!
I was visiting and had a small econobox rental (I forget the exact model). I said hey, we should take this thing up to someplace with a lot of giant redwoods. I’ve never seen huge trees! And so I looked around on the map and saw a Big Basin Redwoods State Park that sounded promising.
The first leg turned out just great. But after touring the park, it was still early afternoon and I thought maybe we can go to Santa Cruz and have dinner before swinging back? The GPS at that point said I basically needed to backtrack down the same road for a ways, but that sounded boring. I was a tourist. I wanted to see new sights! So I had it choose an alternate route down China Grade Road. I still remember that name. Omg. It was a logging road with aggressive dips and switchbacks with huge drops if you missed one.
As a bit of a epilogue, a couple of years later, I was reading “The Never Game” by Jeffery Deaver, and at one point, the protagonist is hunting for someone at Big Basin. After not finding them, he decides to check along a nearby logging road. Hey I’ve been there man! Don’t do it!!