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.
Honestly find this kind of frustrating; it reminds me of the exodus from Twitter to Bluesky. Everyone is jumping ship from one private, proprietary, for-profit service to another without seemingly learning any lesson. It seems like just kicking the enshitification slightly further down the road.
The problem with Open alternatives is the lack of real-time traffic data.
Taking a stand against fash trash corpos will necessarily require some level of inconvenience, in the best case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System1 at least as a stopgap, a small-ish adtech company that may or may not be privacy focused (their claim) is still better than Google. But yeah.
Just to see the clear message in app metrics is a good thing though.
I’m giving Comaps a try. I try OsmAnd every few months and always have issues with it, but Comaps has been solid (for all of 2 round trips so far lol).
Very mixed feelings on System1. I was digging into a Firefox forks and dismissed Waterfox because of the connection. Totally willing to believe they’re better than Google (like Bluesky to Twitter) but that’s such a low bar.
Just support anything that isn’t Google and gets the job done.
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Well this place is fast becoming reddit so I don’t think you’re wrong.