
Ask HN: Why don't default camera apps scan QR Codes by default? - wirddin
I am working on a product which requires people to scan QR codes to access features. It would have been better if any Phone out there could scan QR codes without installing any other scanner app.<p>Why isn&#x27;t this the case?
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chetanahuja
My Moto X (2015) camera app automatically scans not only QR and bar codes but
also scans and OCR's business cards. This might also be true on recent Nexus
devices though I don't have one so can't say for sure.

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qubex
Maybe because it might make it impossible to photograph close-ups of QR codes
without actually scanning them?

In the sense that making the default camera app into a QR scanner entails that
in a certain subset of use-cases it becomes impossible to _take_ a photograph
and not undertake a scan.

Whether this is considered an issue by those studying such matters is unknown
to me; I'm just speculating wildly.

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chetanahuja
Moto X camera app has a neat solution to this. When it detects a business card
or a QR/bar code, it shows an on screen indication of this instead of changing
mode. You can continue to take a picture and/or handle the on-screen
notification in whatever combination you desire.

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qubex
Clever. I was really going out on a limb there.

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juanmacuevas
I agree it would be great if smartphones had a QR code scanner built-in. It
would save lots of code duplication for basic tasks. On the other hand, you
would have to trust that native app being the 'man in the middle' for the data
scanned.

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wirddin
It can prompt the user, asking he wants to continue to the URL embedded in the
QR. Still not sure, why default camera apps do not have this.

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juanmacuevas
I meant that the camera app would know what are you scanning, and could
potentially make changes to it, whether it's a URL or something else

