[rjmunro]

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/

But in this case, there is only one standard, and lots of imitators: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.zxi...

But fallout from the bad app, or possibly deliberate actions by the malware maker have caused hundreds of bad reviews. It might be that removing the malware app from the store means people search for Barcode Scanner, find ZXing instead of the bad one, then post their bad review there. Or maybe the bad app is deliberately telling people "Click here to review the app", and pointing to the wrong app.

There's also reports of some sort of malware doing fishy things with intents to make it look like the ZXing software is bad https://github.com/zxing/zxing/issues/1345#issuecomment-7590....

I'd like to see a proper investigation by someone at Google Play. The original Barcode scanner is not needed for QR codes any more - almost any camera app will recognise those, as will Google's lens application, but it is still useful for scanning other barcode formats and for generating barcodes by sharing data with it from other apps, without needing to upload to a server or anything.