Cover photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash.

Donald Trump's actions have a way of provoking unintended consequences, and awakening the consciousness of European consumers is just one of them.

With his erratic actions and openly anti-European rhetoric, the US President has helped a bottom-up "Buy European" movement to flourish, with Europeans (and their allies) taking to platforms like Reddit to share their tips and recommendations for European products.

Leaving aside the mild irony of using an American website like Reddit to promote European business, the popularity of these groups has ballooned during Trump's second term, with the BuyFromEU subreddit alone boasting over 600,000 weekly visitors.

Imperfect alternatives

While these groups are full of passionate recommendations for all sorts of consumer products, there's one category where users tend to be far from united in their support for European business, and that's software.

Silicone Valley tech giants have spent decades and unknown millions of Euros producing some undoubtedly amazing products, and Europeans are as enamoured as anybody when it comes to the convenience offered by these apps, websites and devices.

Search on a pro-European subreddit for a recommendations for a mapping app, for instance, and every suggestion will be met with retorts of "it's not as good as Google maps", "the directions aren't as easy to follow as Apple", "it doesn't have opening hours on it like Google does", and "the traffic predictions are so bad I couldn't use it".

And so our disgruntled Europeans return to what they're used to, and the US tech giants can sleep easy knowing that their pool of users isn't going anywhere.

Great services are built, not born

Let's be realistic. A European startup isn't going to launch a mapping app that, from its very first day, is as good as Apple or Google Maps. The established players in the industry receive live data from hundreds of millions of users every day, businesses worldwide upload and update their details on the established apps, and the tech giants have had years to refine their offering.

European alternatives like HereWeGo (Netherlands) and Mapy (Czech Republic) may not be as good right now, but they never will be if users can't tolerate a different interface or mild inconveniences. That's a challenge that the buy European movement needs to overcome if it's going to supplant the dominant players.

Personally, I'm a HereWeGo user, and there are mistakes on the map. But you know what else is on the map? A button for reporting those mistakes, and the company even created a dedicated Map Creator app that allows users to report road closures, new routes, and various other changes in their area. In short they're trying to crowdsource a better map, harnessing user engagement to challenge the limitless budgets of some of the world's biggest companies.

Make screen time count

Like many of us, I spend too much time on my phone, rotting my brain cells with memes, short form videos, and checking the news an irrational amount of times per day. Against that backdrop, it doesn't seem like too much to ask for me to spend 10 seconds reporting a change to a mapping app, or enduring a slightly less streamlined app to support an up-and-coming European business.

In many categories, European products are more than a match for their competitors anywhere in the world, but tech is a different story. We've got some catching up to do, and tolerating a little inconvenience is going to be an essential part of the fightback.