FAQ

Two things can be going on, and from your side they look the same.

The first is simply the queue. Far more people signed up than we planned for, so invitations go out in waves, and yours may not have reached the front yet. The Android invitation comes from us, at hello@maplemaps.ca, with a link to opt in on Google Play.

The second is Google. Android testing runs through Google Play, and Google will only add an address that belongs to a Google account. Many people gave us the address they read mail on rather than the one Google knows, and Google refuses those without saying why. We only find out when we upload a batch, and we email everyone it turned down. If that is you, nothing is lost: either attach a Google account to the address you gave us, or send a Gmail address to hello@maplemaps.ca and you go into the next batch.

To skip the wait entirely, write to us now with the address you use for Google Play. When your address goes in, open the link in our email on the phone you will test with, signed in to that account, and Maple Maps appears in Google Play.

Google will not let an app move past a closed test until a group of testers has been signed up for a continuous stretch of two weeks. Someone opting out restarts that clock for everybody waiting behind them.

If Maple Maps turns out not to be for you, tell us why instead of leaving quietly. That is far more useful to us, and it keeps the door open for the people still waiting. On iPhone, TestFlight has no such rule; stop whenever you like.

Far more people signed up than we planned for, so invitations go out in waves rather than all at once. Everyone who signs up gets in; it may take a few days. The invitation comes from TestFlight, not from us, so check the folder your mail app files automated messages in.

If it has been more than a week, write to hello@maplemaps.ca with the address you signed up with and we will check the list.

Email hello@maplemaps.ca, or reply to any message we have sent you. Say what you expected, what happened instead, and roughly where you were. A screenshot helps enormously; a screen recording helps even more for anything that moves, like the arrow or the voice timing.

Every note is read by a person. Nearly every change in the release notes started as an email from a tester.

Every place on the map, and where it sits, comes from TomTom, our map provider. When a Canadian Tire lands on the wrong side of the road, or a gas station in a small town is missing entirely, that is their data being out of date or incomplete, and it is most common outside the big cities.

We do not edit the underlying map, and we would rather not hand-patch individual shops, because that does not scale and drifts out of date just as fast. What we want to build is a way to send corrections like yours back upstream so they are fixed at the source. That involves a third party and will take time, but specific reports, with the name, the town and what is wrong, are exactly what make it worth doing. Send them to hello@maplemaps.ca.

Opening hours, phone numbers and websites are a separate matter: those come from OpenStreetMap, and you can correct them yourself at openstreetmap.org. Edits there reach the app within a day or two.

We picked TomTom on purpose. They are based in the Netherlands, not the United States. They have a long history of making genuinely good mapping and navigation products, their developer programme costs nothing to start, and the quality we are seeing has kept us happy with the choice.

Their data is not perfect in rural Canada, which the question above is about, but no provider's is, and unlike the alternatives their terms let a small Canadian company build on top of them without handing over its users.

Not at launch, but not never. TomTom does not provide transit routing, which is why you have seen none. Enough people have asked that it is clearly wanted, and it is not out of reach: transit agencies across the country publish their routes and schedules openly, so the data exists. The work is in bringing it in so that it is accurate and pleasant to use, and that is a bigger job than a weekend. Treat it as a long-term goal that we intend to reach, not one on the calendar.

TomTom rarely has opening hours for Canadian businesses and never has phone numbers or websites, so the app draws those from OpenStreetMap, a map built by its own community. Where a volunteer has recorded the hours, you see them; where nobody has, the card is blank.

If you know the right hours, the fastest fix is to add them yourself at openstreetmap.org. It takes a free account and a couple of minutes, and the app picks the change up within a day or two. Or tell us and we will do it.

In the current build, every route starts from the phone's position, so if you are sitting at home every route starts at home. That was a deliberate first step: we wanted to get the driving right before adding trip planning.

The next build adds it. The route card gets a "From" row; tap it and you can search for a starting point, pick Home or Work, or press and hold on the map. The route is recomputed from there, and when you press Start, guidance follows the phone as usual.

That is a bug, and it is fixed in the next build. A navigation app should keep the display awake while it is guiding you, and the current build does not, so your phone's own screen timeout takes over. It has nothing to do with Bluetooth or the mount.

Until the update reaches you, lengthening the screen timeout in your phone's display settings gets you through a drive.

Not yet. The app is portrait-only for now. That was a choice to get one layout right first, but a phone in a car mount is often sideways, and several of you have said so. Landscape is on the list; we do not have a date for it.

The posted limit comes from the map data along your route. Where TomTom has it, the sign in the bottom-left corner of the map shows it and changes as you cross into a new stretch. Where they do not, most often right after departure and on some rural roads, the sign disappears rather than guess.

If a limit is wrong, tell us the road and the town. That is map data we can report upstream.

Both are further along than you might guess.

CarPlay works: the map, trip preview, guidance and your saved places all run on the car screen. Apple requires a separate permission for navigation apps to appear on CarPlay, and ours is submitted and waiting. It ships in a TestFlight build the day they approve it.

Android Auto is built too. The car app runs, and the phone already accepts a spoken destination handed over by Gemini. What is not finished is the map on the car screen, so it is deliberately switched off in the current build rather than shipped half-done. It is the next real feature on Android.

The app uses the voices installed on your phone and picks the best one it finds. Settings › Spoken directions › Voice lets you choose; tap a voice and it says a sample line.

Apple does not ship a Canadian English voice, so English defaults to the best American one. French uses Amélie, which is Canadian French. Your phone may have better voices than it uses by default: on iPhone, Settings › Accessibility › Spoken Content › Voices lets you download higher-quality ones, and they appear in our picker after a restart. On Android, the equivalent is in the Google text-to-speech settings.

Once a day, the app tells our server that this phone opened Maple Maps. That is the whole message: a random identifier the app made up when it was installed, and the date. No location, no searches, nothing about where you went. On the server the identifier is scrambled before it is stored, so the record cannot be traced back to a phone, and it is deleted after about thirteen months.

It exists so we can answer two questions: how many people use Maple Maps, and do they come back. That is the only way to tell whether it is worth continuing. There is a switch in Settings to turn it off, and reinstalling the app resets the identifier. The privacy policy has the full wording.

A solid leaf means Canadian-owned and Canadian-controlled: we confirmed it, and every entry carries a source. A hollow leaf means a Canadian head office or Canadian roots, but ownership that is foreign, mixed, or that we could not confirm. Tim Hortons is hollow, for instance, because Restaurant Brands International's own annual report gives its head office as Miami.

The list covers nearly six hundred brands and is meant to grow. Some entries will surprise you, and they are meant to; the point is to let you decide for yourself. If you think we have one wrong, or have missed one, use "Suggest a Canadian-owned business" in Settings or write to leaf@maplemaps.ca with the name and where it is. A source, such as the company's own site, speeds things up.

Two marks, two questions.

The maple leaf answers a question about ownership: is this brand Canadian-owned and Canadian-controlled, so the profits stay here? We research each one by hand, from the company's own filings, press releases and site, and every entry on the Canadian brands list carries its source. A solid leaf means we confirmed it; a hollow leaf means Canadian roots with ownership that is foreign, mixed, or unconfirmed. The leaf is for brands, the names you meet in many places.

The LOCAL badge answers a different question: is this an independent business in the community? One shop, one address, no chain behind it. We do not research the ownership of a single café, and the badge does not claim to; it says only that this is the local option, so it is easy to spot beside the others.

Where the badge comes from, in order:

• City business licences. Where a city publishes its licence roll as open data, we load it, keep the storefronts, and drop anything with more than three locations in that city or that matches a brand on our list. Edmonton and Calgary are loaded today and refreshed weekly. Other cities are added as their data becomes available.
• Owners. A business owner can add or claim their listing in the owner portal. We verify them through an email address at the business's own domain, and a verified listing shows a check on the badge and the hours, phone and website the owner keeps.
• Suggestions. Independent businesses that testers send in, and that we can confirm are a single shop, are listed by us until the owner claims them.

Think a badge is wrong, or missing? Use "Not right?" beside the entry on the list, or write to leaf@maplemaps.ca with the name and where it is.