Update: we turned on this feature in April.

With more than a hundred different varieties of Android smartphones more than a few have an LED Flash/Light designed to help take photographs in low light conditions. Hundreds of users over the past year have asked that we turn the flash on indefinitely when a user is scanning a barcode. At first glance this seems like a reasonable request, but after looking into the idea we decided against including it as a feature in the app.

Cons:

• intensive battery life consumption - the flash was designed to illuminate an area for a millisecond, not for several minutes at a time.
• reduced scanning speed and accuracy – most consumer packaging is high-gloss and the LED flash creates a glare making code harder to read.
• hard to test/troubleshoot – each manufacturer implements the flash a little differently and while we may figure out how to make it work on one or two devices it may break others

Pros:

• LOTS of users seem to want the feature.

The light levels found in 90% of retail are perfect for camera assisted scanning. After the first LED flashes were released and we began getting requests from users we starting asking them questions. The one thing that we began noticing was that the users requesting the feature were scanning products in their homes where the light levels were low. Scanning in low light conditions is difficult. We do a LOT of scanning with our app in retail and it works really well – fast and accurate. When we asked these same users to try out the app in retail they realized they didn’t need the light to scan.

So the question is, should we offer users the ability to turn on their LED flash while scanning given all that we know? Love to hear from you in the comments.