Following the discovery that Motorola phones were hijacking the Amazon app to inject affiliate data, Motorola has confirmed to 9to5Google that it has ended the behavior, which it says was “unintended.”
Earlier this week we reported on an update to Motorola’s Smart Feed app which had started hijacking the Amazon app to inject affiliate data. The bizarre situation would quickly inject the affiliate code, loosely tied to a random fashion influencer, if the user opened the Amazon app via the app drawer.
Motorola has now acknowledged the situation, also confirming that this was not an intentional change.
In a statement to 9to5Google, Motorola says this behavior was “unintended” and that it has been corrected.
Motorola and Device Native jointly developed an app search and suggestion experience for the Moto App Launcher, designed to help users quickly find and launch apps they already have installed on their devices.
Recently, Motorola acted quickly to resolve an issue that was identified, which caused some users in the U.S. launching the Amazon Shopping app to be routed through a web tracking link before opening the app. This behavior was unintended and resulted in an inconsistent user experience.
Upon identifying the issue, we promptly corrected the routing configuration. Users can now expect all installed apps to launch directly as intended.
Motorola takes user experience, privacy, and platform integrity seriously and will continue to closely monitor the system to ensure expected behavior across devices.
We are committed to responsible disclosure, and to transparent, collaborative engagement with researchers to identify and address potential issues swiftly.
Notably, Motorola acknowledges its partnership with Device Native here, something that was seemingly related to this behavior. Our original coverage brought out the publicly available documentation around this integration, which Device Native has since removed entirely – not just the Motorola integration, but its entire public-facing developer documentation.
Motorola didn’t acknowledge the strange means by which its phones were redirecting traffic through a fake website for a fashion influencer. We’ve asked Motorola for more information around this aspect.
Whatever the case, Motorola says this has been rectified. We’re no longer seeing this behavior on our Razr Fold, still running the same Smart Feed app version.
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