I wrote a couple of months ago of the problems I have with the Apple Maps app on macOS 26 and later. I recently had a lot of planning to do for a school trip involving Maps and it bothered me so much I re-downgraded from 27 to 15 (umpteeth time I've done it since 27 released in beta).

Today marks a turning point: I needed an API from 27 again so begrudgingly upgraded again. This time, I zipped up the Maps app and kept it safe in my home folder. After upgrading, I couldn't run the preserved Maps app copied from Sequoia; the signature was no longer valid and it relied on frameworks whose symbols had changed.

Well, my husband and I use ChatGPT Pro subscriptions to help with some of our planning for school (don't worry, we never let it see student work and we don't rely on it to make content. Rather, it makes sense of all the competing requirements and tells us if our own hand-made resources pass the muster. Sometimes it helps us transpose CSV files containing dummy data. You know, the non-creative stuff.

I figured I'm sitting on the Codex stuff so I'd best make use of it. I asked GPT 6 Astra, via Codex, to figure out what it would take to get the Sequoia app running. It worked it out in about 5 minutes, worked out what symbols needed patching, redirected others, and BAM!

I now have an app in my Applications folder called "Maps Sequoia":

If it weren't for this, I might have stayed on macOS 15 forever. I make heavy use of Apple's Maps app; I vastly prefer the user interface over something like Google Maps and it just looks nicer. Above all that, I find the 15 version's interface so much more functional for reasons I explained in my previous post on the matter.

I'm exciting to have the old Maps back but get to benefit from all the later features in macOS (particularly Vision and Translation features that power a fantastic live translation app called SwiftyCrow). I actually rather like macOS 27 (whereas I hated 26). Maps Sequoia is, for me, a glass of ice water in hell.

Apple's not off the hook for shipping a worse version of the Maps app, though. That said, it seems like the newer app is plain SwiftUI and the older one is UIKit for Mac, so perhaps that explains it? They really just gave Mac users the iPad app and called it a day? I can't really be sure, I didn't do the heavy lifting (GPT 6 did)