It was November 2023, just over a month of relentless Israeli air strikes in Gaza when everything snapped into place for Adil Abbuthalha.

On a restless night, the 26-year-old Yemeni-Sri Lankan tech worker was going over the same thoughts that had followed him for weeks.

Disillusioned with his Big Tech job and haunted by the images of Gaza, he wanted to make real change in a world where calls for help were making little impact.

“We saw everything that was going on for weeks and weeks and weeks, and eventually you just felt helpless,” he tells TRT World in an exclusive interview in Istanbul recently.

“I wanted to figure out how an individual around the world could help out.”

By next morning of that fateful November night, he messaged all necessary contacts: they needed to build a boycott app, something simple and accessible. By December, they were building. By January, it was live.

That’s how Boycat was born. Since then, it has helped over a million users steer clear of products tied to human rights abuses and unethical practices worldwide.

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. Thanks to Boycat, ethical consumption is now only a few taps away.

Yet, despite the app’s undeniable success, the young tech-maker’s hour-long speech in the Turkish metropolitan was less about listing off numbers and more about inspiring others to find their own way to serve a greater cause. He was content if he left any mark.

“It stops at you. You could be someone who is just passing by, or someone who has made an impact, who has some sort of purpose,” he told the audience at The Foundation for Science and Humanity in Istanbul’s Fatih district.

Though the young tech-maker describes himself as usually quiet, that side of him is hard to gauge when he speaks about the work that defines him.

His eyes light up and words flow with conviction as he talks about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, an “obsession”, he says, since childhood.

The well-known pyramid scheme developed by psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943 ranks human needs from basic survival to self-actualisation, a distant luxury for billions around the world. Abbuthalha was particularly interested in the base level.

“I noticed that working in Big Tech, a lot of the new tools out there focus on the pinnacle of this pyramid. But my heart was always drawn to the bottom, where people are struggling just to survive, to have a bed to sleep on, to have food on their plate.”

What set his restless thoughts into motion was a dream he had that night in November.

“It’s very cheesy,” Abbuthalha later recalled in an interview. “But I had a dream where I was arguing with someone over why they were buying Starbucks. And they basically just said ‘there’s no alternative’. That's all they said.”

What set his idea apart as an activism tool, Abbuthalha explains in his interview to TRT World, was its decision to confront real-world problems using the language the perpetrators of abuse understood, beginning with Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.

“Petitions, emails, and protests, they weren’t working because we were speaking the language of words. And corporations and governments were speaking the language of money,” he says.

If individuals anywhere could be empowered to “speak the language of money”, Abbuthalha realised, then those opposing the abuses might, at last, have a voice at the table.

Flash forward to 2025, the app has 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 adds.

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.”