I have been assigned a task to find a barcode scanner library which works for iphone, android and blackberry and is good in performance (accuracy + speed). After searching extensively, listed are the meaningful barcode scanning software in the market followed by my analysis on them:
- RedLaser (Very Famous)
- Zbar
- FreeBarcodeScanner (by Shopsavvy)
- Zxing (used by Google Shopper App for Android)
- Pic2Shop (or VisionSmarts)
- QuickMark
Redlaser is the best paid barcode scanner app in the market, though expensive. Its Iphone only. They require 10% of sales if you use their library for a paid iphone application with a minimum license fee of $2500. For detailed pricing have a look at Redlaser Pricing . Our experiments say, its a very powerful and accurate barcode scanner that outperforms all the other mobile barcode scanners. Redlaser is equally accurate on both Iphone 3G & 3GS, while being super quick on 3GS because of the autofocus support. If you find a app in itunes store having awesome barcode functionality, I am almost sure it will be leveraging RedLaser technology. For development, their SDK is available at 50$ which comes with a demo scanner app that works out of box and displays the power of their technology. There is little documentation on Redlaser SDK, so you may face some difficulty adding it to your application. RedLaser recently got acquired by Ebay.
http://shopsavvy.com/developers/
Free Barcode scanner is the best among the freely available options. It works on both Iphone & Android. Support for Windows mobile, blackberry & symbian is under active development. It was recently released by Big in Japan, makers of the shopsavvy app for Iphone & Android. It works smoothly with all versions of iphone and performs almost similar to RedLaser. It comes with a demo app to aid in development/testing. ShopSavvy has another big advantage over RedLaser, as it installs perfectly fine on the iphone 3.0 firmware. Whereas, RedLaser is only available for 3.1+.
Camera with autofocus is usually a must requirement for most of the barcode scanners in the market. Whereas, FreeBarcodeScanner is build on top of open source zxing library, which does not require autofocus camera. Android G1 did not have focus control, so zxing library from google had to innovate to allow the fixed camera lens to change focal length in software 
, which is really cool.
Zbar is another open source option, but only works with 3GS+ phones. Not much used and talked about.
Zxing is an open source option which only works with android. Its used by Google shoppers app for Android. The iphone port of java code only scans qrcodes and data matrixes. And, there is no active development for porting rest of the code. So not of much use to iphone development guys like us.
Pic2Shop is another paid option. It works quite well, though poorer than both Redlaser and freebarcode scanner. Works with all versions of iphone and android. Vision Smarts charges a price of $7000 USD and 10% of sale price.
QuickMark is available for iphone, android and windows mobile.
Other tried : 3G Vision’s i-nigma & barcodeapp(only works for qr and datamatrix codes). Both are pathetic, hardly scans anything.
Then there is visual product search software Snaptell, which is more of image matching software. You take a pic of book/movie box and if it matches in their database, you get the results.
Test Results
We have done experiments of Redlaser, Freebarcodescanner, Zbar and pic2shop on Iphone 3G & Iphone 3GS. Android testing results will be coming soon.
Our test sample consists of 8 barcodes on computer of various sizes & 6 real products with barcode of various sizes. For each pair of (scanner app, device), the result is number of successful scans and total time taken.
On Iphone 3G
| Redlaser | 5/8, 2mins | 5/6, 2mins |
| FreeBarcodeScanner | 6/8, 4mins | 3/6, 2mins |
| Pic2shop | 5/8, 3mins | – |
On Iphone 3GS
| Redlaser | 6/6, 1min |
| FreeBarcodeScanner | 6/6, 1.5min |
| Zbar | 3/6, 3min |