Motorola Was Secretly Adding Amazon Tracking Codes to Your Phone

Motorola has admitted to secretly placing Amazon affiliate tracking codes on some of its smartphones through a hidden system app. The company called the behavior a mistake and says it has been fixed. The Verge first reported Motorola's response after users discovered what was happening.

Here's what actually occurred: when you opened the Amazon shopping app on certain Motorola phones, a hidden browser window would flash open for a split second, install a tracking cookie, and then close before the Amazon app launched. That cookie tagged your shopping session with an affiliate code — essentially marking you as a Motorola referral. If you bought something, Motorola could get a commission, even though you came to Amazon on your own.

How the Trick Worked

The tracking mechanism only kicked in if you opened the Amazon app from your phone's app drawer. If you opened it from your home screen, nothing happened. This suggests Motorola specifically designed the behavior this way, rather than it happening by accident.

Oddly, not all phones running the latest software version did this. Some triggered the redirect, others did not. This inconsistency may explain why it took so long for users to notice.

The system was built at a deep level of your phone — the kind of level where pre-installed apps have special power that regular apps don't have. A split-second browser window is quick enough that most people would miss it entirely.

What Motorola Said

Motorola's product management executive, Allison Yi, confirmed the issue affected "some users in the US launching the Amazon Shopping app." The company said it has now disabled the feature through a software update. It did not say how many phones were affected or how long the feature had been running.

Motorola called the behavior "unintended," which raises a question: pre-installed system apps like this one typically go through testing before they reach customer devices. How did this slip through.

The Bigger Picture

Device makers have tried to make money off pre-installed software before. We saw this in the early days of Android, when phone carriers and manufacturers experimented with various money-making schemes through apps that came with phones. Those were usually obvious advertising partnerships. This Amazon tracking was different — it hid the fact that your behavior was being monetized.

The real concern is about what this reveals about how much power pre-installed apps have on your phone. These apps can do things in the background that regular apps cannot, and you cannot see them the way you might see a suspicious browser extension on a computer. If Motorola hid affiliate tracking, what else might be hidden in those pre-installed apps.

Users only caught this because they noticed strange affiliate codes showing up in their Amazon accounts. A more carefully hidden system might never get discovered at all. Most phones come with dozens of pre-installed apps with deep system access — plenty of places where something like this could hide.

Trust and Questions

The fact that Motorola hid this from users matters legally and ethically. In many places, companies are required to tell you when they profit from your behavior. You did not know Motorola was taking a cut of your shopping.

More fundamentally, this undermines something users take for granted: the idea that your phone manufacturer will not secretly interfere with apps you chose to install just to make money. That trust is why people accept that pre-installed system apps need special permissions on phones.

Motorola responded quickly and fixed the problem, which suggests the company understands the damage this kind of thing can do. But the fact that it was built and deployed in the first place tells us something about what happens inside these companies — and whether people checking the code were really asking the right questions about what system apps are doing.

The larger lesson is worth keeping in mind: smartphones are devices you buy, but the companies that made them can still modify what they do after you own them. And some of that modification happens in ways you cannot easily see.