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Comment by cdurth | Hacker News Reader

I have built 3-4 warehouse scanning applications using a range of bluetooth hardware and BYOD and zebra scanners. From my exp, this product misses the mark for 2 reasons. 1) internet access for license checking. Every warehouse I encountered had enough dead zones to warrant offline first. 2) Pricing seems a bit high. Maybe the target demographic is clients with hundreds of scanners, but this solution wouldn't make sense for small-mid size businesses. Zebra scanners will continue to work and scan barcodes 6 years from now. Transparency on "enterprise" costs would be nice. If i had a ballpark for price for maybe device breakpoints, id consider inquiring. But as it stands, i would advocate for hardware products and quickly move on.

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Fair enough! Regarding your points I have to disagree:

1) Since the library is meant to be used in a web app, how would the app be accessed without internet access? Also there is an Enterprise license which has completely offline operation, but this has been requested mainly for compliance and IT policy reasons.

2) Knowing what some of my competitors charge I disagree. I encourage you to send an email to the address listed on the page, and I will gladly send you the Enterprise factsheet. But yeah, maybe it's not for you and that's fine!

I've built a bespoke warehouse scanning application in the form of a PWA before. Our scanners are meant to always be connected to the internet, but there are dead zones in the warehouses and sometimes the connection just drops out of the blue. We added support for limited offline mode, essentially remembering its state, syncing when the connection comes back or warning the picker to reconnect if they leave it offline too long.

> Since the library is meant to be used in a web app, how would the app be accessed without internet access

If a website still works when wifi is disabled, it's because the entirety of the application has been downloaded and cached by the browser; no further Network requests are needed—or invoked by something the user might want to do, like scanning another barcode.

If scanning a barcode requires a GET, POST, PUT etc. somewhere, it won't work offline.

If scanning a barcode only requires reusing a cached script/function/asset, it should work offline.

Good points.

If the app is coming out of the cache, IIRC it does not count as a page load and typically the SDK is initialized at page load (where the license check happens). Scanning a barcode doesn't require an HTTP request, just the initialization of library.

But I agree that requiring internet access at some point is a turn-off for lots of people.

> Since the library is meant to be used in a web app, how would the app be accessed without internet access?

Progressive web app (PWA), or containered webapps like electron & co.

My thinking here is that containerized web apps built with frameworks like Capacitor or Cordova will typically resort to native facilities. Electron is not a target as the library is meant for smartphones.

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