cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1371422/mapquests-app-surges-to-no-1-in-navigation-after-refusing-to-rename-lake-ontario
Source: MapQuest on Bluesky
MapQuest also released an online tool that lets you jokingly rename Lake Ontario to whatever you want it to be, then share the results on social media.
I’m just glad Mapy.com (local service to where I’m from) also shows proper names of Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario. It’s not Foss but you’re at least supporting neither google nor apple. And their map backgrounds are IMO the best out there, closest to “real paper map”.
Mapy is really good, it’s not OSS but an European company at least
Don’t fall for the marketing. MapQuest uses Open Street Maps data and slaps ads or a paid subscription on top of it. They aren’t ALLOWED to change it, because it is not their data,it is a community project. There are plenty of FOSS clients for OSM, most notably CoMaps.
That being said, I’ve also found OSM to be unusably bad in my area so whatever.
I’ve used OSM and MapQuest and MapQuest feels a lot more usable. It must pull from more than just OSM because if I type addresses I to OSM it often can’t find it whereas I haven’t had that issue with MapQuest yet.
OSM pulls from a few different sources, but for exact details it’s the community that enters the data. Can’t find an address or business? Add it and then it’ll be there for everyone.
OSM doesn’t really “pull” data. The vast majority is sourced by hand, and adding data from existing sources is a complicated process that requires a lot of preparation and cleaning up afterwards. So basically all of it is a community effort - and a single contributor can make a significant contribution to the project
Maybe “pull” was the wrong word. However, looking at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/History_of_OpenStreetMap I see:
- 4th December 2006 – Yahoo! aerial imagery sketching allowed…
- September 2007 – TIGER data import for the US started
- 20th September 2007 – AND Data for The Netherlands imported
- 1st April 2010 – Ordnance Survey Opendata releases.
- 30th November 2010 – Use of Bing vertical aerial imagery allowed
And on https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contributors it shows well over a hundred counties/regions with hundreds(?) of non-user data sources/sets that are used by OSM to maintain the map.
Edit: clarity.
Wel yes, sketching is exactly the manual labor I was talking about. The TIGER import was indeed massive and very automated, but the US community is to this day working on reviewing it. The Dutch situation is very similar - because it had early, high quality open data. In countries were data was released later or of poorer quality, the OSM map had already been filled up to a degree that doing these massive imports became very hard. Majority opinion is that that’s actually a good thing - it seems like countries where the map was filled organically (both by hand alone or also with smaller, slower imports) have a more thriving mapper community. I don’t think the Ordnance Survey data was used for a massive imports, but rather as one source during the mapping process (the others being notes from going there yourself, open street view images, aerial or satellite imagery, …). As an example, here in Belgium we started importing buildings around 2019, which you can clearly see here. But it only sped up an existing process of adding those buildings to the map.
Exactly. Just add what’s missing yourself. It’s kinda fun to edit the map of your local area and its super helpful for others.
Okay but I don’t need a map for places I know well enough to edit and I don’t really find myself randomly looking at maps of areas I know well
You can let the whole world know that it is 3.2 miles to boonhet’s house. Party time! /s
No idea who went and downvoted me for a fact that applies to probably 99% of the world’s population. Anyway, I did go and add several missing local businesses, removed defunct ones and relocated some government services that were showing locations they hadn’t been at for like 20 years. But my point stands, unless you go out of your way like I just did, you usually don’t naturally find yourself looking at OSM for the places you’re most qualified to update.
I use Google maps a lot to check opening hours of local restaurants. I thought I’d try that with an OSM app, and most of the places weren’t even there. I’d never trust the details of those that were.
On the other hand, my cycling computer uses OSM data and it’s quite complete enough for that purpose. With a couple of exceptions that I just remember that I need to correct.
People will move to anything but the open stuff
I think traffic data matters to a lot of people. Granted MapQuest has a traffic API that FOSS could use for data.
The open stuff kinda sucks with traffic though
I’ve noticed the same trend.
Reminder - if you subscribe to the name change - that the mnemonic for the Great Lakes has changed from HOMES to SHAME, with America right in the middle of it. You couldn’t make this up.
Reminder that the mnemonic for the Great Lakes has changed from HOMES
… no it hasn’t.
Point taken. I have added a qualifier.
If you subscribe to the name change you probably can’t read this anyway.
Why is the name changing? The article didn’t even say why
Trump issued an executive order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America the other day. Google Maps pulls its name data from the US Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), and so once GNIS updated to follow the executive order, that change flowed down to Google Maps. It’s pretty much the same thing that happened with the Gulf of Mexico/ Gulf of America thing last year.
Geez what a joke. Thanks for explaining it
I downloaded it. I also use Organic Maps. It uses Open Street Map data. Doesn’t have lake names but still lists “Gulf of Mexico”. google can get bent.
If you’re using Organic, it’s worth considering Organic’s fork CoMaps, which was created by major contributors in response to these grievances.
I wasn’t aware of this. I’ll check out comaps. Thanks!
By default, I wouldn’t trust any Estonian OÜ that isn’t founded and run by someone who has either lived in Estonia or is currently living in Estonia. We made it too easy and cheap for foreigners to start a company here without ever setting foot in the country, which is why these Russian and Belarussian guys were able to start a company in Estonia. It’s like Delaware LLCs on steroids. We also don’t have corporate profit tax, only tax on dividends paid out and salary taxes.
For 2025 they reported 119k EUR in “other income”, but zero revenue. Not a single one of them was paid a salary, but they did pay out 68k EUR in dividends. So they’re not just pocketing the donation money, they’re also committing tax fraud by working on it full time (presumably) and paying dividends instead of salary. Source: Their declaration for last year. This wouldn’t fly for a local company, not sure why they’re letting e-residents get away with it.
TIL there’s a MapQuest app.
I can’t find the MapQuest map in the Japanese App Store, and CoMaps doesn’t seem to have very many search results when looking for local spots here.
Anybody have a good recommendation for a map app in Japan that is more privacy-centric?
I’ve been wanting to ditch Google Maps for a long time.
Well, you can contribute to CoMaps to map your local area — it can actually be quite fun to just walk around and add businesses and the like. Kind of like some of the games that have you walk around and catch creatures in balls, except you map your local community, find new places and spots, and basically contribute meaningful stuff :)
Not sure about Japan specifically, but I use Here We Go. i have also found that Open Street Maps based maps don’t have enough info in my area.
Here We Go is sort of a legacy project, currently owned by several European car manufacturers, servers in the Netherlands, a good country for data privacy laws. Basically it costs money to operate a maps app, but it’s a rounding error for the type of money they make. Solid privacy policy. Closest in functionality to Google, using TrioAdvisor for discovery/reviews/pictures/business info. Solid at real time traffic. Built in buttons to run in offline mode and delete any data. You can save favorite locations without an account.
It’s not perfect though. Closed source. Can’t search along route in Android Auto mode, and when you do in normal mode it does not tell you how much time will be added to the trip. Voice assistant doesn’t work in Android auto (its no longer installed on my phone though). 2 trackers: Google Crashlytics & Facebook login. You can turn off telemetry in the app though, and not sign into Facebook obviously. You have to download it from Play Store specifically for Android Auto, not even Aurora Store, not even if you enable unknown sources for Android Auto.
I’ve been looking too but I can’t find any specific to Japan. I think you and I are gonna have to add every single spot in Japan.
Is MapQuest for Android some weird 8-bit thing, or did I just download some random app with the same name.
Ha — it looked like that in the AppStore too and I left when I saw the 8-bit stuff. Maybe that is their app?
Yeah, I googled a bit and found it is their app:
https://help.mapquest.com/hc/en-us/articles/38308169880461-Changing-your-Questie-preferences
