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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.
Motorola has now issued a statement to Android Authority saying that this was “unintended” behavior and that the app should be working properly once again. The company said that it had teamed up with Device Native to develop an “app search and suggestion experience” for the Moto App Launcher. This feature is meant to help users quickly find and open locally installed apps.
However, it seems like this feature may have resulted in an unforeseen issue:
Recently, Motorola acted quickly to resolve an issue that was identified, which caused some users in the US 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.
In other words, Motorola says this was an accident and that users don’t have to do anything to fix the problem. We can understand if you’re skeptical about the company’s claims. But between the seemingly unrelated affiliate links and the obvious browser window that fleetingly opens, this certainly seems like an error rather than malicious and deliberate behavior.
In saying so, this issue does highlight just how much control manufacturers have over their phones. The fact that companies can serve up affiliate links or other content when you try to open an app is pretty concerning. On the bright side, Motorola is teaming up with Graphene OS to launch a smartphone. So people who want a more secure phone free of tracking and analytics should keep an eye on this.
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