Motorola has issued a statement after a rather bizarre issue when opening the Amazon app on Moto phones.
Users opening the app would briefly see a browser containing a weird URL before being redirected to an Amazon affiliate link.
Motorola has now confirmed that this was ‘unintended’ behavior and that it has fixed the problem.
Motorola phones were in the spotlight earlier this week when a Redditor discovered rather concerning behavior when opening the Amazon shopping app. Instead of simply opening the app, affected phones would briefly open a browser containing a shady URL before redirecting to an Amazon affiliate link. This made us wonder whether Motorola was stealing affiliate revenue or if something equally concerning was afoot.
The Redditor who originally discovered the issue found that their Razr 60 Ultra was sending a bunch of requests to devicenative.com. Device Native is a Motorola-affiliated ad company. They also found that the issue was triggered by the preloaded Smart Feed app. Meanwhile, 9to5Google spotted the issue on their Razr Fold running version 2.03.0070 of the Smart Feed app. Furthermore, the outlet discovered that the shady URL initially seen in the browser window linked to a fashion influencer’s website.
