The most-downloaded free apps on the Apple App Store are pretty predictable: Claude, ChatGPT, and TikTok currently rank in the top ten. But this week there has been a surprise guest in first: MapQuest. The navigation app was dominant in the days before GPS-enabled smartphones were in everyone’s pockets, back when when printing out directions from the computer room and bringing them on the road was how you got to a new place. But when tech giants like Google and Apple took over the mobile game, the company — which was sold for more than $1 billion before the dot-com crash — was left behind by most users who just use the GPS apps preloaded on their phones.
MapQuest’s unexpected rise began last Thursday — a “normal workday,” says general manager Doug Berger. Then President Donald Trump, amid his economic war on Canada, let it be known that he wanted to change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. Berger quickly conferred with his team in Denver and told the world in a post that the company was keeping the name used since at least 1639:
Web-mapping apps have been through all this before; in January 2025, Trump decided that the Gulf of Mexico would now be called the Gulf of America. But for “the sequel,” as Berger calls it, the company has seen a surge of popularity as Google Maps and Apple submit to the president’s whims, as they did with the gulf. “Around 1 million people have downloaded the app since Thursday,” Berger told me the following Wednesday. (In the previous month, some 40 million people used the app, he says.)
