Ubuntu GNOME maintainer Jeremy Bicha informed the community a few days ago, specifically on July 14, 2016, about the fact that the popular GNOME Maps application from the GNOME Stack recently lost the free map service, MapQuest.
Of course, this automatically translates to the fact that GNOME Maps is no longer a functional application as of July 12, 2016, and it seems that it may take weeks or even months for the GNOME development team responsible for maintaining the application to find a new free service to display the maps.
As a result, the Ubuntu GNOME developers are currently discussing the possibility of abandoning GNOME Maps starting with the upcoming release for the Xenial Xerus series, Ubuntu GNOME 16.04.1 LTS, which is expected to be released on July 21, 2016.
Jeremy Bicha said:
“I spoke briefly with Tim Lunn (darkxst) and we would like to remove gnome-maps from ubuntu-gnome-desktop because we would not want to support Ubuntu GNOME 16.04.1 with an application that does not work at all. We will need a fast-track SRU, since we have less than 7 days left for ISO testing.”
It is indeed a very unfortunate incident, especially because GNOME Maps is a fairly popular mapping application these days, used by many Linux users on multiple GNU/Linux operating systems. If the GNOME Maps maintainers don't find an alternative soon, the application may be removed from other expected distributions as well.
