New Actor: Mapquest App Surges After Refusal to Rename Lake
MapQuest kept "Lake Ontario" on its maps instead of adopting "Lake America." Downloads then surged by the hundreds of thousands. Usage jumped to roughly 50 times its normal level by the weekend.
By Sunday, it was the No. 1 navigation app in the United States on Apple’s App Store and on Google Play. It moved ahead of Google Maps and Waze. A week earlier it ranked 80th among free iOS navigation apps in the U.S.
It climbed into the App Store’s U.S. top 10 overall, reaching No. 8 by Monday morning. On the U.S. charts that exclude games, it sat at No. 4.
In Canada, it topped the free iPhone chart by Monday morning, while Sunday evening snapshots had it at No. 2 overall. Google Maps shows the new lake label to U.S. users, while Apple Maps still showed "Lake Ontario" as of Monday morning. MapQuest also launched a web tool that lets people make and share joke renamings of the lake.
Synthesized from 17 sources
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AI-synthesized from multiple reported sources
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