I find it surprising that even nowadays most smartphones don't seem to come with any way to read QR codes. You'll have to install an 3rd party app on all phones I have tested (vanilla android, iPhone, N9 most lately). Why is this?<p>Some factors why I would expect it to be part of any modern smartphone:
- Technology is easy to implement and standardized.
- QR codes are no more just for techies, but you start to see them everywhere.
- Integrating the functionality to the OS camera app would make it easier to read the QR codes.
- It is easy to demo by the phone company and most customers know how to use it.
Well, I'd say it's because of legal issues. A couple of months ago I was investigating QR codes.<p>Other than the fact most (if not up to 80%) of people either don't know what a QR code is or how to 'read' it.<p>It's a pretty clever design, at its core is encoding binary data to an image (largest is about 512KB if I remember correctly).<p>Liability comes into play when you consider that it's possible to encode a virus or other malicious code into QR readable format which people can willy-nilly scan into their phones.
Windows Phone has built-in QR scanning capability. It was integrated into the OS as part of the last major update (7.5/Mango).<p>It's a feature of 'Bing Vision' which allows scanning of QR Codes, Microsoft Tags, Standard Barcodes, and Text. This is built-in to the general Bing (Search) feature of the OS and is avaliable on all Windows Phone devices.