Trump trying to rename things is boring, and people griping about it is even more boring. Here’s why:
Nothing in this world has one and only one name, least of all mappable things, which are — by definition — social and political objects. Names for these things vary by language, nationality, region, and every other major distinction you can think of. The United States of America is also Estados Unidos de América, États-Unis d’Amérique, 美国, الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية, and Соединённые Штаты Америки. Some of these names are literal translations, others not. For example, the Viet name for the USA is Hoa Kỳ, which means “flowery flag” (as in the stars).
Google and Apple know where users are and they change map labels based on that. People in China, France, Brazil, or Pakistan see maps in the appropriate language(s). On a finer-grained level, people in different anglophone countries are shown maps with the appropriate variations in orthography variations (“color” vs “colour,” “center” vs “centre”) and idiom (“freeway” vs “motorway,” “parking lot” vs “car park,” etc). That’s normal.
In practice, that means these map services are perfectly capable of calling it “Lake America” for US users and “Lake Ontario” for Canadian users. And, in fact, through extensive experimentation — I searched Google Maps for the two names from a US IP address and then from a Canadian IP address — I’ve determined that that’s exactly what Google does. Canadians see “Lake Ontario” and Americans see “Lake America.” I can’t be arsed to reproduce experiment this using Apple Maps because it’s dumb and boring.
So, basically, Americans are upset that American companies “obeyed-in-advance” (remember that quaint phrase?) the American president’s diktat. His announcement carried no legal force, but — as we’ve seen — his administration aggressively pursues entities and people it perceives as obstructing it. Google and Apple could have taken a heroic stand and become embroiled in a transient non-issue, but instead they did exactly what their shareholders would want them to do: protect their investments.
If you’re upset by this, your issue isn’t really with Google or Apple, it’s with Trump, or with the GOP, or with capitalism. And of all the myriad things that Trump & Co are doing, this kind of imaginary renaming of geological features doesn’t matter. Offensive? Absolutely. Delusional? Without a doubt. But it won’t kill people, it won’t destroy essential institutions, and it isn’t irreversible. On the contrary: when Trump crosses that rainbow bridge, which will be soon enough, these companies will quietly revert these changes.
What Trump did is dumb and boring, and getting worked up over it instead of something that matters is even dumber or boringer. So I hope you’ll consider finding something more significant and permanent to get worked up over.