I can’t believe I need to point out that Motorola mobile is owned by Lenovo which is a Chinese company, in turn, which is subjected to abide the Chinese laws that let the CCP have arbitrary access to its whole data.
When motorola operates and sells in foreign countries. It has to abide by those countries rules. Unless, you buy china only phones with china ROM I wouldn’t worry about that.
But, ads and this shady affiliate redirect is serious. I would install apps like PersonalDNSFilter or Adguard to make sure you protected some.
A Motorola Razr 60 Ultra user on Reddit was the first to notice this behavior, using an ADB log to show that the launcher is directing users to a URL instead of the Amazon app they expected to open. It traces back to the Smart Feed app, one of the apps Motorola has pre-loaded on many of its phones including the latest Razr (2026) family of foldables. A network log also shows the device making requests to “devicenative.com,” a website for a service that places ads on smartphones (and isn’t too quiet about its integration with Motorola).
So basically, it’s a Motorola developed app that comes stock with their phones. That’s wild. It also has to be illegal (since it’s Motorola injecting their own affiliate link when you buy one of their products on Amazon, which has to be some kind of fraud).
The article speculates that this isn’t intentional by Motorola. I’ve also seen mentions speculating a compromised library
Secondly, we can speculate as to what’s going on – and that’s what the following is, speculation and conjecture. While many would quickly, understandably, point the finger at Motorola here, my gut says something else is going on, and that it might not be a decision Motorola actually planned out. The redirect through a seemingly fake website and affiliate code of an influencer that has no obvious ties to Motorola is just too bizarre to ignore.
The f?? The same Motorola that will ship phones with GrapheneOS? Didn’t they learn from the Honey situation?
What’s the Honey situation?
Honey is an browser extention that got promoted by tons of influencers/youtubers. It supposed to look up for discount codes, coupons and etc. that it can use on popular online shopping platforms.
The situation was that in reality Honey was intentionally picky on what code to apply, and it would claim that it gave you a discount when in reality there was none.
Edit: browser extention
Probably not because legally nothing happened to them…
It all got “dismissed with prejudice” so they got off completely consequence-free at the end of 2025.
That means it is pretty much legal and free game to do it, at least in the shithole USA lol. Hence why everyone is now doing it. Capital one just made a browser clone that does the same thing too.
Probably will quickly come here to the EU too…
Not speaking from authority, but I’d actually think the EU would prohibit it. With all their flaws etc. like everywhere, the EU at least has definitely shown some balls on more than a few occasions in the recent past. They’ve refused to capitulate on a number of issues with major companies - the first one that comes to mind is the e-waste reduction policy that led to Apple starting to use the USB-C standard. If Apple had their way, they’d continue using proprietary cables until the end of time, all to make more money off something that offers no advantage and only adds more poison to the earth and takes more money from the customer. Standing up to them demonstrated that the EU at least has the stones to do that, and isn’t entirely owned by the rich corps yet. In the U.S.A. what happens is that companies like Apple tell the government to jump and they ask “how high?”
