How to Stop Your Mac from Automatically Opening the Maps App When Clicking Addresses

Because macOS relies heavily on deep system-level data detectors, the operating system is constantly parsing text to identify specific types of information. If someone emails you a physical address, or you click a hyperlinked address on a restaurant’s website in Safari, macOS will automatically launch the native Apple Maps application to display the location.

While Apple Maps has improved significantly over the years, many users vastly prefer using Google Maps via their web browser. Having the heavy, dedicated Apple Maps app violently launch into the foreground every time you misclick a street address is incredibly jarring and completely breaks your workflow, especially if you were trying to copy the address to paste into Google Maps.

Because macOS does not provide a simple “Default Maps App” toggle like it does for web browsers, you must use a specialized third-party utility to intercept these address clicks.

How to Stop Apple Maps from Automatically Opening

To force macOS to ignore Apple Maps and use Google Maps instead, you must install an open-source utility called “Bumpr” or “OpenIn”. For a free, open-source alternative, we highly recommend LinCastor or the browser extension Map Redirect.

If you prefer a simpler browser-based approach using Safari:

1. Open the Safari browser on your Mac.
2. Go to the Mac App Store and download the Mapper extension (or a similar Maps redirection extension).
3. Click on Safari > Settings in the menu bar.
4. Click on the Extensions tab.
5. Enable the redirection extension.
6. Configure the extension’s settings to redirect all maps.apple.com links to google.com/maps.

With a redirector installed, whenever you click a physical street address in Mail, Contacts, or Safari, your Mac will automatically open a new tab in your default web browser and load the location directly in Google Maps, bypassing the native Apple Maps application entirely.