[athenot]

The irony is you can scan a URL with a phone camera and it's clickable, with the nice side-effect that the domain is human-inspectable. Just make the font a little bigger and it scans easily.

QR codes are fascinating though, as they can encode more than mere URLs. But the vast majority in the consumer space are links. For that purpose, I'm rooting for OCR.

[lou1306]

A big advantage of QR code is that it's just a square, whereas URLs occupy short, wide rectangles of space. They are also robust to a number of situations where OCR may struggle: small size, low light, fading...

And they are human-inspectable. It is regrettable that iOS's camera app just prompts you to open a QR-encoded URL in a Web browser, but you can use a "passive" scanner that just reveals the payload without risk.

[jedbrooke]

it’s gotten to the point where I’ll find myself screenshotting text and using ocr to grab links because sometimes apps disable highlighting text for whatever reason.

[bhasinanant]

Agree with a lot here. QR Codes have however become a cornerstone of digital convenience in a lot of the world. All the more true here in India, where basically everything is using QR Codes, from payments to restaurant menus. People here are still not used to using Lens + OCR. Then, there are issues like long links or confusing zeroes and O's. QR Codes solve these pretty well, I believe.