- Motorola’s Smart Feed app appears to add affiliate codes for purchases through the Amazon app
- This means that Motorola, or whoever the code is attached to, would get a kickback for your purchases
- But there is evidence that this behavior may not have been intentional
Something very strange – and unaccountable – appears to be happening on some Motorola phones, as 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 happen on 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) running the latest version of Smart Feed, so apparently only certain phones are affected.
But it’s worrisome behavior regardless, as this basically means that every time you order something from the Amazon app, Motorola will quietly receive an affiliate fee, despite having 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 home screen icon, but you can see evidence that it’s happening because the Chrome browser will flash up for a split second to inject affiliate links.
You can see this happen in 9to5Google’s video below, which first shows the Amazon app opening from the home screen and then from the app drawer.
Look at
This is reminiscent of the scandal Honey previously 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 kickback, even removing other referral links you might have tried to use.
It gets weirder
But in Motorola’s case, things look weirder than the company simply trying to take a piece of your Amazon purchases, because 9to5Google also found that the Chrome website that flashes up 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 attached to a fashion influencer? And on top of that, the actual affiliate code being generated doesn’t seem to match any that have been shared by Abboud. So it may well be that this was not a deliberate act on the part of either Motorola or Abboud.
Regardless, Motorola users are understandably not happy, taking to Reddit to say things like “it’s really sketchy” and describing this quirk as “straight up malware.”
Hopefully Motorola will clean things up soon, but in the meantime, you can disable Smart Feed to prevent this behavior. To do so, go to Settings > Apps, then search for Smart Feed and tap ‘Disable’.
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