Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto.
Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more.
Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University.
I honestly forgot MapQuest existed until recently, with modern map apps like Google Maps, Waze, and even Apple Maps (which really doesn't suck now) taking it out years ago. I think the last time I actually used MapQuest was back in 2007 or 2008, before I owned a smartphone or even an external TomTom GPS device. I printed directions to get to a nearby movie theater or something, but ended up traveling the wrong way for a solid 30 minutes — good times.
But apparently, MapQuest is still limping along, and recently, it launched a dedicated Android Auto app following a wild surge in popularity. Here's what happened: US President Donald Trump renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America, and Apple and Google bowed to the pressure and changed how the body of water's name appears on their respective maps for US-based users.
Then MapQuest came out of the shadows and refused to make the change, even releasing a statement that bluntly said, "We're not changing it." Very quickly, usage grew to 50 times the normal rate, and MapQuest rocketed to become the number one overall app in the App Store.
"Hundreds of thousands of people signaled to us this weekend that we got it right by downloading our app," said Doug Berger, MapQuest's general manager, in a recent statement to several publications. Even now, the little-known map app sits at number two in the free iPhone navigation apps category, which is an impressive achievement any way you look at it. With that in mind, as one of the few Canadians on the XDA team, I decided to try MapQuest's new beta Android Auto app to see if it's actually usable.
A new map app has entered the fray... sort of
What's old is new again
In short, MapQuest's Android Auto app is a little rough around the edges and is pretty bare-bones compared to Google Maps, Waze, and even Apple Maps. First off, it tends to freeze every once in a while and is very laggy, which isn't great when you're behind the wheel. On top of that, it can take a long time to calculate a route sometimes. Voice navigation also isn't the best and often cuts you off mid-sentence. At the same time, voiced directions sound robotic and like something straight out of 2012, regardless of what voice option you select.
MapQuest does include several expected modern map features, though. It offers turn-by-turn navigation, real-time traffic updates, route optimization, favorites, saved locations, and even the ability to search for nearby places like gas stations or EV chargers. Thankfully, route preferences let you avoid things like toll roads and ferries. There's even a cool Collections feature that lets you add similar locations to in-app folders. I can see this being useful if you want to save the locations of several restaurants, or a few key spots you frequently take your child.
I'm actually surprised crowdsourced incident reporting is part of MapQuest, given that for the feature to be successful, people around you also need to be using MapQuest, obviously — but I guess you need to start somewhere. In my experience, crowdsourced reporting is non-existent, but I guess that could change if MapQuest keeps building an audience.
Could I switch to MapQuest if I wanted to? Probably
I probably won't actually do it, though
There is something to be said about how clean MapQuest's on-screen interface is, especially compared to Google Maps and Apple Maps, which have gotten increasingly busy over the past few years (Waze is still pretty clean, thankfully).
In fact, the app has an old-school video game theme that I kind of vibe with, right down to its app icon and selecting your Questie icon (of course, I selected a pumpkin given the season). Thankfully, the core functionality of putting in an address and navigating to a location works fine, though I find the interface a little too zoomed out for my taste.
Overall, MapQuest's obviously rushed Android Auto app (I wonder if it's vibe-coded?) isn't quite as bad as I expected. I can see people using it as an alternative to Google Maps and Apple Maps given the whole Lake of America controversy, or even if someone takes issue with Waze's Israeli origins.
With all of this in mind, will I personally continue using MapQuest in protest of how quickly Google Maps and Apple Maps caved to political pressure? Probably not. I'm just too used to Google Maps and Waze, but I respect anyone who's decided to deal with the often wonky Android Auto MapQuest app.
If you don't see MapQuest on your Android Auto dashboard after downloading the app from the Google Play Store, navigate to Settings > Connected Devices > Connection Preferences > Android Auto > Customize Launcher > and make sure MapQuest is selected.
