The Lake Ontario name change ordered by US President Donald Trump is already showing up on Google Maps, but several rival apps are, for now, refusing to follow suit. On 27 August 2026, Trump signed an executive order renaming the lake ‘Lake America’, framing it as retaliation against Canada over trade talks, according to PBS NewsHour.
Worth pointing out: Lake Ontario’s name has no connection to the Canadian province of the same name. It is an Indigenous name, meaning ‘the lake is big’ or ‘the lake is beautiful’, first used by Europeans in the early 1600s, before either the US or Canada existed as a country, according to Fast Company. That context has not appeared to trouble the White House much.
What Google Maps now shows for the Lake Ontario name change
Google moved quickly. If you open Google Maps in the US, the lake is now labelled ‘Lake America’. Open it in Canada and you’ll still see ‘Lake Ontario’. Open it anywhere else on the planet and you’ll see the compromise formation: ‘Lake Ontario (Lake America)’. Three versions of the same body of water, depending on where you’re standing. Google has previously explained that its policy is to follow the naming conventions of the US Geographic Names Information System. It did the same when Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico ‘Gulf of America’.
There is, of course, another possible reading: Google, with its trillion-dollar business, has little incentive to antagonise the Trump administration. Whether you call that policy compliance or something else is up to you.
Waze also still shows ‘Lake Ontario’ on its map and in search results, up to a point. Tap the result and the name flips to ‘Lake America’. Given that Google owns Waze, the eventual alignment was always coming; the app just takes a moment longer to get there.
The apps still using the original name
As of now, the following apps are still displaying ‘Lake Ontario’ without qualification:
Apple Maps, MapQuest and Organic Maps are all holding the line. Apple is the one to watch: it eventually updated the Gulf of Mexico to ‘Gulf of America’ on its maps, so the same move on Lake Ontario looks probable in time. Apple Maps users may not be looking at ‘Lake Ontario’ for much longer.
MapQuest and Organic Maps, by contrast, never updated the Gulf of Mexico label, which suggests they are unlikely to shift on Lake Ontario either. For anyone who wants a map that reflects the name the rest of the world uses, those two are currently the more reliable options.
The clock is ticking on the official update
This is not just a tech-company story. The executive order gives the US Department of the Interior 30 days to update the name change with the Geographic Names Information Service, the official repository of domestic geographic names in the US, according to the BBC. Once that federal database is updated, any mapping service that follows US naming conventions will face pressure to fall into line, which is how Google Maps ended up here in the first place.
It is worth remembering the scale of what this administration has already done on this front. Trump’s earlier executive orders renamed the Gulf of Mexico ‘Gulf of America’ and returned Alaska’s Denali to its previous name of Mount McKinley, according to PBS NewsHour. Lake Ontario is the latest in that series.
The Lake Ontario name change sits in a long queue of geographical edits being processed whether anyone asked for them or not. For now, MapQuest and Organic Maps are the holdouts. The 30-day Interior Department deadline will be the next hard marker to watch.
