The Gulf of Mexico will now appear as the Gulf of America for users of Apple (AAPL) Maps, Bing Maps and Google (GOOGL) Maps in the U.S., following an executive order from the Trump administration to rename the body of water. Apple updated its maps app today (Feb. 11) to reflect the change, as first reported by Bloomberg, while Google made the cartographic change yesterday. The Microsoft (MSFT)-owned Bing Maps, meanwhile, confirmed to Observer that it will also show the new name.
The gulf, which borders both Mexico and the U.S, has been known as the Gulf of Mexico since the 16th century. Trump in January ordered that official U.S. maps update this name to the Gulf of America in recognition of its “critical importance” to the U.S. His executive order also maintained that Denali, the tallest mountain peak in North America, revert back to its former name of Mount McKinley.
Google last month announced that it would “quickly” update its Google Maps to comply with both name changes as soon as they were updated in official government sources like the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS)—a policy it described as a “longstanding practice” of the company. The company followed through this week, announcing that it has “begun rolling out changes to reflect this update.”
Users of Google Maps in the U.S. will now see the gulf referred to as the “Gulf of America”, while those in Mexico will still see the “Gulf of Mexico” and all other countries will see the “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America).” Country location is determined by phone operating systems for mobile users and by device location and selected Search setting regions for web users, said Google, which also updated its Google Earth system to include the new label.
Apple Maps will follow suit for U.S. users today, Apple told Bloomberg, noting that the change will also be rolled out for global users at a later date. Apple did not respond to requests for comment from Observer.
Bing Maps, too, will change the gulf’s name in the U.S. “We are committed to providing users with accurate and up-to-date information,” said Microsoft in a statement to Observer. “In accordance with established product policies, we are updating Bing Maps to reflect the Geographic Names Information System’s nomenclature in the United States which includes changing the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America in the US.”
Denali’s name change, meanwhile, hasn’t yet appeared in GNIS or been updated on either Google Maps, Apple Maps or Bing Maps.
Google Calendar scraps Pride month and Black History Month
Maps isn’t the only part of Google that has undergone change in recent months. Google Calendar for mobile and web users no longer includes previously referenced holidays such as Pride month, Black History Month, Indigenous People Month, Jewish Heritage, Holocaust Remembrance Day and Hispanic Heritage, as first reported by the Verge.
In a statement, Google said that it began streamlining the number of holidays on its calendar last year after realizing that “maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable.” While the company has long drawn its holiday and national observances from a website called timeanddate.com, it began manually adding other global cultural moments a few years ago. “In mid-2024 we returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments,” it said.
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