It’s like QR codes too. First it was invented… but no phone platform supported it natively, then WeChat in China built a platform and ecosystem within phone platforms and bundled a QR code reader which made it take off in China, then something like 10 years later Apple adds QR scanning to the camera app and we get pervasive QR codes finally. Saying “nobody uses it” is a copout if you are a de-facto monopoly.
That's not correct. Firstly, it had taken off in Japan a long time ago. Blackberry supported it in fact and I remember being at an intern recruiting event where the recruiter was smug about QR codes being on the cusp of mass adoption (being more than a decade early is wrong for this kind of stuff).
The problem was that the UX sucked. The UX today still kind of sucks but it's infinitely better than what was available when QR codes were first around by being integrated into the camera app.
The issue isn’t the QR, it’s the weird dynamic of a restaurant with a guy who shows you to a table, then you’re ordering from some stupid webpage.
For the price of eliminating underpaid waitstaff, the customer has a weird, slow ordering experience that cannot accommodate undocumented needs. The customer response is: fuck you.
Pretty sure China had no part in popularizing it and third party apps had support for it on iPhone a long time ago. I was seeing and using QR codes here in the US back in 2010 or so pretty commonly. They were limited to college campuses and SF bay area then but still were around plenty.
I remember being frustrated that my non-smartphone flip-phone didn't support them (and no way to add support for them either).
I lived in SF in the 2010s... QR code adoption was abysmal. I'm not saying China wis why we adopted QR codes, but because the QR code function was part of the main UX of their main platform (Wechat app), there was massive adoption of QR codes before the US started doing so in the late 2010s because our major platforms (Android, iOS) started integrating it into the core UX.
