macOS includes a system-wide feature called Data Detectors. When you are reading an email in the Mail app, looking at a contact card, or browsing a website in Safari, the operating system automatically scans the text for anything that resembles a physical street address. It then converts that text into a clickable, underlined hyperlink. If you accidentally click this link, macOS will violently rip you out of your current application and automatically launch the Apple Maps app.
While this is intended to be helpful, it is incredibly frustrating for users who strictly prefer Google Maps or who simply clicked the address by mistake while trying to highlight the text to copy it. Having a heavy application like Apple Maps suddenly bounce open in the dock breaks your concentration and clutters your workspace.
If you want to stop macOS from aggressively converting plain text into Apple Maps triggers, you can use a hidden Terminal command to completely disable the Data Detectors engine.
How to Stop macOS from Auto-Linking Addresses
You must write a specific configuration key to disable the smart text recognition.
- Open the Terminal application on your Mac (you can find it in Applications > Utilities, or search for it using Spotlight).
- Copy the following command exactly as written and paste it into the Terminal window:
defaults write com.apple.messageshelper.MessageController SOInputLineSettings -dict-add "automaticDataDetection" -bool false - Press the Return key on your keyboard to execute the command.
- To ensure the changes apply system-wide across all applications, you may need to restart your Mac (or at least quit and reopen Mail and Safari).
Note: If you ever want to re-enable this feature in the future, simply run the same command but change false to true.
macOS will immediately stop scanning your documents for street addresses. The text will remain as plain, unclickable text, allowing you to easily highlight and copy it into Google Maps without ever accidentally triggering the Apple Maps application.