MapQuest isn’t renaming Lake Ontario, despite Trump’s executive order. And downloads are surging

Over the last few days, hundreds of thousands of people have downloaded the MapQuest app from Apple’s App Store, making it the number one navigation app. There’s one reason why: The OG online mapping company said that it has no plans to rename Lake Ontario following President Donald Trump’s executive order calling it Lake America.

“We saw the president signing the name change executive order, and we had a very quick conversation and immediately came out with a simple statement: We’re not changing it,” says Doug Berger, general manager at MapQuest. “And we were blown away by the trajectory of that post.”

If you type “Lake Ontario” into Google Maps, by contrast, it now autocorrects to “Lake America”—at least if you’re in the U.S. In Canada, Google Maps still shows it as Lake Ontario. Google said in a blog post that its policy is to follow official government sources, and the U.S. Geographic Names Information System formally changed the name to Lake America at Trump’s behest. Canada, of course, did not make that change, which is why Canadians still see the original name on Google.

It might be a reasonable policy in ordinary times. But at a time when the president is changing names based on grudges—calling Canadians “nasty people” for refusing a trade deal they saw as unfair—MapQuest didn’t see the need to follow conventions. The company leaned into the absurdity, launching a second site that lets people give the lake their own joke name. (One popular choice on X: Lake of Hormuz.)

It’s worth noting that companies and other organizations don’t have to follow the federal government’s choice of names. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) website explains that federal agencies need to follow official name changes, but they aren’t binding on states or private mapping companies. It appears that MapQuest has made some changes in the past, including renaming Mount Denali; that federal renaming process took 40 years, though Trump later reversed it.

Lake Ontario is an Indigenous name, meaning “the lake is big” or “the lake is beautiful.” It was first used by Europeans in the early 1600s, before either the U.S. or Canada had become a country.

When companies adopt government name changes, that matters, says Derek Alderman, a geography professor at the University of Tennessee. “These decisions of adoption, while on the surface appear to be a matter of simply following procedure and law, play a major bearing in shaping the likelihood of a name change being accepted and used by the public, which can shape the extent to which a name change will stick around or have longevity,” he says. “The more institutions and people use a particular name change, the more institutionalized that change becomes within everyday practice and language and then the harder it is to change the name back.”

MapQuest’s experience with Lake Ontario echoes what happened last year when the Trump administration renamed the Gulf of Mexico. Google Maps followed the government’s new name of Gulf of America. Apple Maps, which hasn’t yet commented on Lake Ontario, also eventually renamed the Gulf of Mexico. MapQuest did not.

“We made the exact same call at that time,” Berger says. “We started the whole thing by making a joke about it, because MapQuest is old—people have nostalgia for MapQuest, this year’s our 30th anniversary—we made a joke that we’re not going to rename it. Not because we don’t want to, but because we don’t know how to update our maps. So that became the first semblance of a viral hit for MapQuest.” (For those who haven’t used MapQuest recently, the app got a UX redesign last year, so it doesn’t feel that dated.) Stephen Colbert gave a shout-out to the app on his show, giving it even more traffic at the time.

The app is currently seeing around 50 times its usual usage, Berger says. “Clearly, we struck a chord. And we’re just enjoying every moment of it.”