Motorola's pricey phones might be hijacking Amazon app to steal affiliate revenue

Motorola’s Razr phones are among the best foldable phones on the market, spanning mid-tier to premium flagship segments. Unfortunately, it looks like these phones might be shipping with a scummy affiliate-stealing feature.

Redditor Trypocopris recently spotted a rather peculiar issue on their Razr 60 Ultra. The user found that launching the Amazon shopping app results in the phone opening a browser instead. This browser opens a “sketchy-looking URL” which subsequently redirects to Amazon’s URL with an affiliate code appended to it. This entire process seems to happen very quickly, so you might miss it if you look away for a couple of seconds.

The Redditor then checked the phone’s web traffic via ADB and found requests being sent to devicenative.com. This seems to be an ad-related company that has a relationship of sorts with Motorola. Furthermore, the pre-installed Smart Feed app appears to be enabling these actions. Either way, it looks like the Smart Feed app detects when you open the Amazon app and quickly opens its own affiliate link in a browser.

9to5Google also dug a little deeper and identified the aforementioned “sketchy-looking URL” as kira-abboud.com, which is apparently related to fashion influencer Kiras Fashion Finds. The resulting affiliate link (sramz-kff-008-20) initially seems to point to the influencer, but the outlet notes that this link doesn’t match any of the influencer’s previous affiliate URLs. This suggests that Motorola or a third party is laundering affiliate links.

It also seems like the issue only affects Motorola devices with the latest version of the Smart Feed app (version 2.03.0070). I can confirm that I’m not seeing this issue on my Motorola Razr 2025 World Cup variant, which is running an older Smart Feed version (v2.03.0056). However, 9to5Google adds that while both their Razr Fold and Moto G Stylus 2026 are running the latest version of the Smart Feed app, only the Razr Fold is affected by the issue.

So is this purely a case of Motorola hijacking the Amazon app in order to make cash via affiliate links, or has the Smart Feed app been compromised? We’ve asked the company about this practice, whether it plans to bring it to more phones, if affiliate links from other sources are affected, and if other shopping apps are affected. We’ll update our article as soon as Motorola gets back to us with some answers. For now, you might want to disable the Smart Feed app if you’re seeing this issue on your Moto handset.