Lake America relabel sends MapQuest to the top of Apple's free app charts

The user in this story opens Apple Maps in early September, sees Lake Ontario labelled Lake America, and goes to the App Store to find something else ^[1]. Some users took the new label as a position the company had chosen, and acted on it ^[3].

A free install is the cheapest form of protest available on a phone. Leaving a dominant product takes more, because the user has to stop reaching for it every time they need directions. Google Maps leaves roughly 20% of the market for every other service combined, by the estimates Fast Company cites ^[17]. The reporting covers download rank. It does not include retention, daily use, or any count of people who deleted Google Maps or Apple Maps.

For the challengers, the work starts after the install, and it turns on whether the app handles the trips a new user takes. TomTom's free app is designed "exclusively for drivers" and has no walking or cycling routes ^[9]. HERE WeGo routes by car, public transport, foot and bike, but has no Street View ^[10]. It lets users download whole countries for offline use, while Google's offline areas are limited and expire after a year ^[11]. Citymapper plans transit trips in 430 cities ^[15]. For users weighing privacy, Magic Earth says it never collects personal data or tracks movements ^[13], and Organic Maps is free and built on OpenStreetMap data ^[12].

MapQuest's app offers real-time traffic and turn-by-turn guidance ^[16]. The company is looking into wider availability after receiving requests for the app from "people in multiple countries," spokesperson Anne Brownlee said ^[8].

The test I'd apply to a spike like this has two axes. One is what the user did. Installing is cheap; making a new app the first one you open, or paying for it, costs something, and Sygic, for one, charges a subscription for traffic updates ^[14]. The other axis is coverage: whether the app handles the user's trips in the country where they live. A cheap act on an app with poor coverage is a protest, and it fades. An install of an app that fits is a trial, and the useful figure there is how many people still open it a month later. Paying or changing habits for an app that misses their trips usually gets undone. Only the fourth cell, a costly change to an app that fits, means the dominant product lost a user. The Lake America evidence so far is download data, so it sits in the first two cells.