- Motorola’s Smart Feed app appears to add affiliate codes to purchases through the Amazon app.
- This means that Motorola, or the person the code is linked to, will receive a commission for your purchases.
- But there is evidence that this behavior may not have been intentional.
Something very strange – and sketchy – appears to be happening on some Motorola phones, as the devices appear to have been caught adding affiliate codes to orders placed through the Amazon app.
The behavior was first spotted by a Reddit user with a Motorola Razr Ultra (2025), with Motorola’s pre-installed Smart Feed app appearing to be the culprit. 9to5Google has since replicated the behavior using a Razr Fold, and the site also claims that this quirk doesn’t occur on older versions of Motorola’s Smart Feed app, so it only started with the latest update.
This also didn’t happen when 9to5Google used a Moto G Stylus (2026) running the latest version of Smart Feed, so apparently only certain phones are affected.
But it’s still troubling behavior, because it essentially means that every time you order something on the Amazon app, Motorola will quietly collect an affiliate fee, although it has nothing to do with you placing the order.
Oddly, this only seems to happen if you open the Amazon app from the app drawer, rather than from its icon on the home screen, but you can see evidence of this as the Chrome browser will flash for a split second to inject the affiliate link.
You can see this happen in the video from 9to5Google below, which first shows the Amazon app opened from the home screen and then from the app drawer.
Look on it
This is reminiscent of the scandal Honey once faced, PayPal’s Chrome extension that promised to automatically apply the best discount codes to online purchases, but would also attach its own referral links to the purchase to get a commission, even removing other referral links you might have attempted to use.
It gets weirder
But in Motorola’s case, things seem stranger than the company simply trying to undercut your Amazon purchases, as 9to5Google also discovered that the Chrome site that appears when you launch Amazon is “kira-abboud.com,” which appears to be a reference to fashion influencer Kira Abboud.
But why on earth would Motorola use an affiliate link related to a fashion influencer? And on top of that, the affiliate code generated does not appear to match the one shared by Abboud. So it may well be that this was not an intentional act on the part of Motorola or Abboud.
Either way, Motorola users are understandably not happy, taking to Reddit to say things like “this is really sketchy” and describing the oddity as “real malware.”
Hopefully Motorola will clarify things soon, but in the meantime you can disable Smart Feed to avoid this behavior. To do this, go to Settings > Apps, then find Smart Feed and tap “Turn Off”.
Follow TechRadar on Google News And add us as your favorite source to get our news, reviews and expert opinions in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can too follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form and receive regular updates from us on WhatsApp Also.
