MicroQR scanner phone apps (#R23)
I’m not reeeeally into app recommendations, but that one bothered me for a long time…so here it goes:
For all your barcode needs on a mobile phone: Use the Cognex scanner! Available here for Androids and there for low hanging fruit.
Why the recommendation? Because, for reasons unknown to me, no standard camera app on both systems, nor any other barcode app that I could find for Android does support MicroQR codes. Basically everybody does Code 128 and 39, some do weirder stuff like interleaved 2-of-5, and 2D apps often support things like standard QR, Datamatrix or Aztec. But MicroQR? None. Zip. Nada. Searching for “MicroQR” in the app store only leads to garbage search results and scanner apps that explicitly list MicroQR as “not supported”.
Cognex however does. Of course they also support the other stuff, but I was specifically looking for MicroQR, since I’ve been using that for basically a decade now. And until two weeks ago, when a colleague mentioned it, I never had a mobile scanning app for it.
Plus: While I only used handheld barcode scanners from Datalogic and Zebra so far – maaaybe I’ll have a go with Cognex next time. Small things like that are how one attracts the attention of an engineer, and then one thing leads to another, and suddenly a stupid free, ad-free and easy-to-use phone app is the deciding factor in a 5-digit hardware purchase when all other parameters between different models and brands are comparable.
Good on ya, Cognex, thank you very much for that simple piece of software nobody else bothered to provide.
