How to read QR codes on Android

We’ve all seen QR codes, those black and white squares that look like 2D barcodes. But do we know exactly what these codes are?

The QR acronym comes from “quick response”. It was created by the Japanese company Denso Wave in 1994 as a way of encoding for a quick reading, and they spread rapidly. The reading is performed by the three squares at the corners that give the reader the position of the code for a very quickly and accurately reading.

These codes are open source, and we just need a camera and a reader to interpret them. We can use any smartphone, as we only need to have an app installed that translates the image acquired by the camera.

What kind of information contains a QR code?

A QR code can store a very small amount of information, but it can be very useful in many applications. One of the most practical uses consists in using these codes to enter data on smartphones without typing, such as addresses or phone numbers. On the other hand, magazines and advertisements often include QR codes with links to their respective websites.

How can we use an app to read QR codes?

There are many applications for Android that let you read QR codes from your smartphone, although one of the most widely used is Barcode Scanner. With this app we can capture an image of the QR code with the camera of our device using the option “Scanner”, which appears when you start the app. This will recognize the code and launch us into the web address, if there is an address coded.

Barcode Scanner offers some complementary functions to optimize our experience with QR codes. You can download it from the Google Play.