How a navigation app built for Canadians started on one person's laptop

I've written here about builds, costs, data and roads, but never about the person doing the writing. A lot of you have asked who's behind Maple Maps, and whether there's a company with an office somewhere. The honest answer: it's me.

Who I am

I live in Alberta, but I've lived all over Canada, including Ontario, Québec and Saskatchewan. Much of my family is still in Québec, which is a big part of why French has been in Maple Maps since the first day, not added later. The app follows your phone's language, and it can guide you in French as well as English. That was never going to be optional for me.

My background is in marketing, not software. When I started, I didn't know how to build a navigation app. But I knew exactly what I wanted to build, and what it should feel like for the person using it. That has guided every decision since.

Why I started

I wanted a navigation app that doesn't run through one of the big American tech companies. Partly for some freedom from the turmoil south of the border, partly as a small statement about how a lot of Canadians feel right now, and partly because it keeps our data here. That's also why there are no accounts: nothing to sign in to, and no data about you for us to sell, leak or be asked to hand over.

How it went

I wrote the first line of code on 1 September. Two days later the beta opened, and I posted about it once, on one Facebook page. I was expecting a hundred people. Within five days there were 1,600 sign-ups, and a quiet experiment turned into something people were driving with every day. Version 1.0 reached your phones on 13 September.

At the start, Maple Maps ran on TomTom, a Dutch map company: their map, their search, their directions. Since then I've moved almost all of it, piece by piece, to our own servers in Québec, built from open data: the map itself, search for addresses and businesses, directions by car, bike and on foot, transit, and speed limits. Today TomTom supplies only the traffic. Along the way Android Auto arrived, so the map and the directions are on the car's own screen.

The project now has more than 4,700 changes behind it and dozens of builds, and a great many of them started with an email from one of you.

Who does the work

I write and test the app, run the servers, answer your emails, and write the release notes and these posts. I do have help, though. I use AI tools every day, for writing and checking code, digging through map data and drafting text. The decisions, and the responsibility for them, stay with me.

I want to be honest about the AI tools. They aren't my first choice, and they're not something I plan or hope to keep using indefinitely. They're a means to an end. For a fledgling idea with big dreams, they've let me turn my vision into a reality much faster than would otherwise have been possible.

I'm not doing it alone at home either. My husband and I have two young kids, aged six and one, so ours is a busy house. My husband helps me carve out time for Maple Maps around everything a growing family needs, and none of this would happen without him. We're also business owners, so we know from experience what it takes to start something from the ground up and grow it.

Why progress sometimes slows down

This is the part I most wanted to explain. When something takes longer than you'd expect, it's usually one of three things.

The stores. Every build has to pass Apple's or Google's review before it reaches you, and I don't control how long that takes. A fix can be finished in an afternoon and then wait days to reach your phone. So I've stopped sending out lots of small updates that each wait in line, and I'm holding releases until each one is solid.

One person. When I'm deep in a hard problem, like keeping the arrow on the road or getting a direction to come at the right moment, everything else waits. And some weeks, family comes first, as it should.

Care. People trust a navigation app at highway speed. I'd rather take an extra week than put out a build that sends someone the wrong way.

What would change that

More people. Once Maple Maps can pay its own way, the first thing I want to do is bring others on board, so the app isn't held up by one person's week. Until then there will be quiet stretches like the last few weeks. Quiet here doesn't mean nothing is happening. It usually means I'm in the middle of something.

Thank you

Thank you for testing an app made by one person, for the reports and the screenshots, and for your patience when things take longer than either of us would like. If you want to tell me something, write to hello@maplemaps.ca. I read every message.

Mathieu