Preface

When Apple released the first beta of iOS 7 at WWDC 2013, I scoured through the API changes looking for anything out of the ordinary. That’s when I noticed the unexpected addition of new APIs pertaining to barcodes.

At that time, barcodes were little more than visual noise to me, a necessity of modern commerce but of no value to me as a consumer or app developer. Why would Apple devote precious resources to implementing functionality for that?

Several third-party libraries for barcode scanning were available at that time. Some were commercial offerings too expensive for casual use. Others were open source projects requiring a great deal of work to understand or implement in your own apps. By adding support for barcodes within the iOS ...

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