If you can't choose which disputed boundary is right, you can at least choose the right tool.

A customer approached us with a problem. Their app had been enjoying explosive growth in a foreign market. This was a pleasant surprise--they hadn't been trying to grow there. But then, just as suddenly, the growth stopped. They soon realized that their map was the reason. The country in question was embroiled in a longstanding territorial dispute with a regional neighbor over a small set of islands. A user in the new market had noticed that the app didn’t display their nation’s preferred name for those islands and had organized a successful boycott in response. Now the customer wanted to know: how could they fix the map? How should they fix the map?

This problem is more common than many people realize. There are dozens of active territorial disputes. Many of these are benign disagreements that the associated countries simply haven’t gotten around to resolving. But others are active or even deadly, have important strategic implications, and arouse intense emotions in each side’s citizens.

Sooner or later every map company has to navigate these disputes, but many try to pretend otherwise. They invisibly serve users different maps based on IP address, device locale, account settings, or whatever other signal they can find. Usually, they don't explain how they do this, or even that they do this at all. But they do.

When people learn about this, they tend to find it unsatisfying or upsetting. But that’s exactly why companies do it. Users looking at a map often have strong opinions about which borders are the right ones to show. I certainly do. Of course, other users have conflicting opinions. What makes this particularly difficult is that users don’t just want to see their preferred borders. They want to know that everyone else is seeing those borders, too. As a result, it is often impossible to make one map that will satisfy everyone. In truth, the problem isn't the map: it's that an underlying dispute remains unresolved. Map companies can't solve geopolitical disputes, so instead they try to pretend they don't exist.

Mapbox takes a different approach. Our technology is designed to let customers build the best possible map for every audience. We put the full power of our platform in customers’ hands. That developer-centric focus makes it hard to dodge these kinds of issues (though we do expose a variety of tools to simplify them, from Worldviews to Mapbox Boundaries).

The downside to this transparency is the question that remains. If we're not going to deny the problem, and we can't fully solve it, how should we begin to address it?

People usually start by asking whether they can defer to an impartial higher authority. What about the U.N.’s official international boundaries? After realizing that no such boundaries exist, they move on to step two: clarifying the nature of the problem and figuring out the best imperfect solution.

Some countries have legal regimes that require particular cartographic approaches, making territorial disputes a question of regulatory compliance. If that’s the case, you’re going to have to talk to your lawyers so that they can determine your company’s specific obligations. Once they have those answers, the customizable nature of Mapbox technology will ensure that they can be reflected on your map.

In other cases, the issue will have more to do with users’ national pride than legal risk or app functionality. That was certainly the case for the customer mentioned above: the islands in question are unsettled and secured by naval patrols, which swiftly turn away any civilians who approach. The lack of expected labels had nothing to do with the consumer use case that the customer’s app was built to address.

In situations like that, the depiction of a disputed territory is akin to taking a public position on a controversial social issue. Communications scholar Paul Argenti suggests that companies consider three criteria when making such decisions: Does the issue align with your company’s strategy? Can you meaningfully influence the issue? And will your constituencies agree with speaking out?

In most cases, the first question is easy to answer: you probably don’t have a strong perspective on the dispute in question, other than a healthy sense that you don’t fully understand the historical, ethnic, religious, and/or strategic issues that shape its participants’ intense feelings.

The second question is also easy to answer, albeit unsatisfyingly so. You and I might suspect that an app’s depiction of a border has little to do with how conflicts between nation-states are resolved, but users in those nations typically disagree. As interesting of an epistemic question as that may be, it’s overridden by a simpler axiom: the customer is always right.

That leaves the last question as the most interesting and determinative: how will your constituencies respond if you take a particular position? You will need to balance new audiences’ expectations against those of your more mature markets, taking both their size and the intensity of their perspectives into consideration. Sometimes, simply omitting map features that are irrelevant to your use case might be the best option available. Other times, different audiences should receive different maps. This can feel frustrating! But remember: you’re in business to solve a problem your users have. That’s difficult enough. You don't need to give them new ones to worry about along the way.

Ironically, while recent years’ international decoupling has raised tensions and harmed? many businesses, it does sometimes make this problem easier. Here, the customer in question had decided not to try to build their business in the new market’s regional rival, so adding the map labels their new users expected to see had little practical downside. Better still, Mapbox technology allowed this change to be made at the map style level, rolling it out to users instantly, without the need for an app update.

When you face a choice like this, you will be in the best position to decide the right way to serve your audiences. Whatever approach you choose, the Mapbox platform is the best tool for implementing it. Whether it’s getting great defaults for an audience of millions by setting a worldview with one line of code, or navigating the meticulous nuances of when a maritime boundary gets displayed: we’ve got you covered.