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What if instead of QR, it was a special human-readable text format that was optimized for image recognition? Like a special font or something.

I suspect that the cameras on low-end phones would struggle with OCR text in suboptimal conditions (low-light or damaged text).

QR codes have redundancy, which makes them resilient in a variety of conditions that plaintext isn't.

Also, you can 'hide' ugly tracking urls in QR codes (e.g. a short-link that lets you count number of scans or update the redirect location).

could just use the torch