Apple Maps Just Relabeled Lake Ontario as Lake America

Apple Maps has renamed Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” Bloomberg reported on September 1, after President Donald Trump asked Apple to make the change and after Google Maps already flipped the label late last week.

Bloomberg says Apple Maps now shows “Lake America” to users in the United States, keeps “Lake Ontario” for users in Canada, and displays both names for everyone else, matching the approach Apple took when it put Gulf of America on the map last year. The Maps view from here still says Lake Ontario with a US VPN, so Canadians cannot see Lake America in Apple Maps even after pointing a VPN at the United States.

That split only belongs in the body of the story because Trump’s executive order covers US federal usage of the smallest of the five Great Lakes. It does not decide what Canada, international bodies, or other mapping apps have to call the water sitting between Ontario and New York, even if Apple’s American map now says otherwise.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said on August 31 that Trump reached out to Apple directly, and Bloomberg‘s report is Apple tracking the US Geographic Names Information System the same way Google said it was doing over the weekend, only a couple of days later.

MapQuest kept Lake Ontario on the map and rode that refusal up the App Store charts, so the original name is still one tap away.

If this feels like a rerun, it is, because Apple already relabeled the Gulf of Mexico after a January 2025 order and has now done the same thing to Lake Ontario, and depending on where you open Maps you will either see the original name, the new one, or both stacked together, which is going to make border-town screenshots look like they were taken on different planets.