This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on November 9, 2026 - November 15, 2026

There is a certain poetry in the TuJu story. On Oct 20, the prime minister urged Malaysians to ditch Waze for the home-grown alternative TuJu. A day later, the app was offline for “system upgrades”. Its eventual fix, an update on Oct 30, was to launch Google Maps whenever a user wanted to navigate.

The irony is that Google Maps reportedly incorporates some data, such as road closures and traffic incidents, from Waze, the very service the government wanted to move people away from. The sovereignty project has been routed, quite literally, back through the same thing it was meant to replace. If the concern was Waze’s Israeli origins and data exposure, the remedy now sends users to another Google-owned product with, reportedly, some of the same data in it. That’s not independence. It’s a detour.

The deeper problem is how backwards this was done. A serious national alternative should have been load-tested before anyone asked millions of people to download it. Instead, the endorsement came first and the infrastructure second. The app faced disruptions after a surge in users following the recommendation. Successful launches do not fail because people actually use them.

Then there is the practical cost. TuJu and Google Maps do not appear to share an integrated system, so users who want TuJu’s traffic camera features must switch between the two apps while travelling. Switching apps at highway speed is hardly a safety feature.

To be fair, there is a real idea buried in here. Highway CCTV feeds, toll estimates and rest-stop details are useful and a niche tool built around these could earn a place on the phone. But that is a companion app — not a Waze killer. Pretending otherwise sets it up to fail.

Tech sovereignty is built slowly by investment in mapping data, engineering depth, honest beta periods and humility about what a new app can do. Many long, hard steps stand between the desire for tech sovereignty and achieving it.

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