It began with a dream. Like most revolutionary ideas do. But this radical intersection of technology and moral urgency started with an actual dream that Adil Abbuthalha had about Starbucks. 

Abbuthalha is part technologist, part moral entrepreneur. He is the mind behind Boycat, an app that reimagines the act of consumer boycott as a streamlined digital gesture, both personal and collective. Ethical consumption is now, thanks to Boycat, a few taps away. 

It had been over a month of relentless airstrikes on Gaza when everything finally snapped into place for Adil Abbuthalha. 

On the night of November 14, 2023, the 27-year-old Yemeni-Sri Lankan tech worker, then based in Silicon Valley, lay awake, turning over the same restless thoughts that had followed him for weeks. 

Disillusioned by his work in Big Tech and haunted by the devastation unfolding in Gaza, he found himself gripped by a need to act. What set his thoughts in motion was a dream he had that same night. 

“It’s cheesy,” he says, “but I dreamt I was arguing with someone about buying Starbucks. And they just said, ‘There’s no alternative.’ That’s all they said.” 

By morning, he had messaged friends and contacts with a simple proposition: they needed to build an app— something simple and accessible. By December, they were building. By January, the app was live. 

That’s how Boycat was born: an app built to help users steer clear of products tied to human rights abuses and unethical practices worldwide, was born.

What set his idea apart as an activism tool, Abbuthalha says, was its decision to confront real-world problems using the language the perpetrators of abuse understood, beginning with the Israeli occupation of Palestine. 

Unlike many activist tools, Boycat was created not to speak truth to power, but to speak the language power already understands. 

“I realised that petitions, emails, and all the ways people were voicing their concerns online weren’t working,” Abbuthalha tells TRT World in an interview in Istanbul. 

“And I didn’t know why. They were speaking the language of money,” Abbuthalha adds, “and we were speaking the language of words.”

Flash forward to 2025, the app has attracted over a million users and helped shift more than $250 million in spending from boycotted companies to ethical brands, based on scans, searches and surveys Boycat conducted to track what users avoid and how consistently they follow through. 

It’s the “lowest possible estimate,” Abbuthalha says. 

How does the app work?

Upon downloading Boycat, users land on a home page where they can tap a barcode scanner to check products in real time, or use the search bar to look up brands and items manually.  

If the product scanned or searched does not meet the standards, a detailed product page shows up to lay out the background on the company’s practices, and suggest vetted alternatives.

The data behind these classifications comes largely from the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, a global campaign to pressure Israel to comply with international law. BDS officially partnered with Boycat in November 2024. 

This is alongside the work of Boycat’s dedicated research team that carefully reviews open-source materials, including corporate records, international reports, as well as local Israeli newspapers, to ensure nothing goes missing.

Central to the app is its three-tier classification system. 

Level 1 includes companies explicitly named by BDS for direct support of Israeli military operations or violations of Palestinian rights. 

Level 2 targets corporations closely affiliated with Level 1 entities—subsidiaries, parent companies, or partners. Level 3 encompasses firms with more indirect ties, such as financial backers or those offering material support. 

For instance, Caterpillar, whose bulldozers have appeared in countless images of home demolitions in the Occupied Territories, is marked “non-compliant” at Level 2. While not a direct BDS target, its role is significant enough to warrant inclusion.

The app is actively working on expanding its local brand database further so users in any province across the world can find ethical local alternatives to noncompliant companies in their own regions, according to Abbuthalha.

During a visit to a Bay Area grocery store, Abbutalha was delighted to see shelves cleared of boycotted goods and niche brands like Salaam Cola taking centre stage. 

The app’s barcode scanner and boycott survey features were used by thousands weekly, targeting conglomerates like Nestlé and PepsiCo. The impact was quantifiable: people are scanning, avoiding, and choosing differently. 

That difference began to register on corporate balance sheets. Starbucks, long the target of boycott campaigns over its ties to Israel, reported a six percent drop in global sales. Nestlé, too, has cited boycotts and “geopolitical tensions” as factors in its faltering growth. 

While Palestine is its main focus for now, Boycat plans to soon let users choose other causes they care about.

“Coming soon” campaigns include Congo, where militias, including the M23, known for growing war crimes against civilians, control the mining of conflict minerals such as tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold. 

‘Boycat is bigger than me’

 When Abbuthalha began developing Boycat, he was still employed at a major Silicon Valley firm. 

With no prior coding experience, he taught himself to program using AI tools, YouTube tutorials, and open lectures from Stanford and Harvard. The app went viral almost instantly—1,000 App Store downloads were driven by a single Instagram reel. 

That success, however, came at a cost. Videos featuring the app soon surfaced in his workplace group chat. Days later, he was pulled into a one-on-one meeting and dismissed. 

“I was fired because I was doing something right,” he says. It became a credo.

At a later point, the app was temporarily taken down by Google following a “massive amount” of user reports accusing it of spreading misinformation, particularly over its listing of Caterpillar, despite it being supported by a report from Haaretz, Israel’s oldest newspaper.

The pushback did not stop there. To this day, Abbutalha receives constant threats from circles that see his enterprise as a threat. 

“Honestly, if you look at my DMs at this point, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever — I get death threats almost every week,” says Abbutalha.

Despite the pressure, Abbutalha sees these attacks as confirmation that the platform is striking a nerve. “It’s serious, but at the same time, I’m not worried, because I know that if it’s my time to go, it’s my time to go,” he shrugs. 

His sights, he says, are set on the bigger mission. “My goal is to make Boycat outlive me.”