I’m going to be honest here and admit that I originally had no idea there were so many different types of barcodes (I’m certain this isn’t them all either). If you need to support some (or all) of these, then the Bar-code scanning part of ML Kit will handle all of this for you.

Now, it is probably time to answer that one question that might be on peoples minds, but why? As primitive and simple that barcodes seem, that is the point! Barcodes are accessible but many — I myself in the past have joked about “Oh not another QR code!”, but the great thing about these is that they don’t require any special or powerful hardware to read, are platform independent and can be read by a number of different means (such as camera, barcode scanner etc). This makes barcodes accessible to many different users and devices around the world, regardless of how low-end the device is as all we require is a camera or some means to read the barcode data.

This is great news for your app as it Firebase Ml Kit now makes this functionality even easier. If you’re already using a third-party SDK or requiring your users to use another app for barcode scanning functionality, then you can now make use of Firebase to do this for you.