Even legitimate app developers have no incentive to keep their apps sterile. Someone just has to approach you with your 10+ million users barcode scanner app and offer you +50,000$ in order to install some automated ad clicker for them. Don’t be naive, the majority will accept the money and gladly. I believe that particularly makeshift applications such as e.g. barcode scanners are susceptible to this kind of overtak…
> Apps that offer what should have been offered by the OS vendor in the first place. This is really it. The Google/Android team have already made the "Zebra" library that actually reads barcodes; why on earth do they not include this as a standard app. Instead we get this myriad of different barcode scanner apps with all sorts of harmful features. All the heavy lifting is done by the Android team anyway (the actual b…
Imagine you are an app developer of a really simple app that takes a number and tells you if that number is in a valid phone format or not. You have a textbox, the user enters it, you do the checking and display the result. Easy. Now imagine you want to allow scanning a qr which contains a number, to do the checking afterwards. You need to either ask your users to use an external app to scan and then open yours, include all the qr related library inside yours, or use a special intent from a third party app (that the users need to have already installed).
First solution is slow and inconvenience for users, the second is what almost all apps do, but then the code logic is duplicated on all of them (with the increment in app size). The third option is the best, both for the developer and for the user, however there is no official qr service so in the end this is basically option 1.
I mean, you already have a service to get a picture, a file and a contact, among others (you don't need to include all the code, simply do a call to the respective intent and wait for the result) so why don't extend this with the qr too?