- Motorola’s Smart Feed app appears to be adding affiliate codes to Amazon in-app purchases
- This means that Motorola, or whoever is linked to the code, would receive a kickback for your purchases.
- But there is evidence that this behavior may not have been intentional.
Something very strange and sketchy seems to be happening on some Motorola phones, as the devices appear to have been found 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), and Motorola’s pre-installed Smart Feed app appeared to be the culprit. 9to5Google has since replicated the behavior using a Razr Fold, and the site also claims that this oddity doesn’t occur in older versions of Motorola’s Smart Feed app, so it only started with the latest update.
It also didn’t happen when 9to5Google used a Moto G Stylus (2026) with the latest version of Smart Feed, so apparently only certain phones are affected.
But it’s still worrying behavior, since this basically means that every time you order something from the Amazon app, Motorola will silently receive an affiliate fee, despite having nothing to do with you placing the order.
Interestingly, this seems to only happen if you open the Amazon app from the app drawer, rather than from the home screen icon, but you can see evidence of this happening because the Chrome browser will flash for a fraction of a second to inject the affiliate link.
You can see this happen in the 9to5Google video below, which first shows the Amazon app opening from the home screen and then from the app drawer.
Look
This is reminiscent of the scandal Honey previously faced: the PayPal Chrome extension that promised to automatically apply the best discount codes to online purchases, but would also attach your own referral links to the purchase to earn a commission, even removing other referral links you might have tried to use.
it gets weirder
But in Motorola’s case, things seem stranger than the company simply trying to take a cut of your Amazon purchases, because 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 would Motorola use an affiliate link linked to a fashion influencer? And on top of that, the actual affiliate code that is generated doesn’t seem to match any that Abboud shared. Therefore, it is quite possible that this was not an intentional act on the part of either Motorola or Abboud.
Regardless, Motorola users are understandably unhappy, taking to Reddit to say things like “this is really sketchy” and describing this quirk as “outright malware.”
Hopefully, Motorola will clarify things soon, but in the meantime, you can disable Smart Feed to prevent this behavior. To do this, head to Settings > Apps, then find Smart Feed and tap “Turn Off.”
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