Are QR Codes Dead? Do People Still Use QR Codes?
The QR code has been declared dead roughly once a year since 2015, usually by someone at a tech conference. Meanwhile the square quietly became plumbing: it is on your restaurant table, your electricity bill, your boarding pass and half the shop counters in Pakistan. Here is the reality check, without the invented percentages.
Why it refused to die
Two shifts did it. First, habit: the pandemic trained a whole planet to scan without thinking — menus, vaccine certificates, payments. Second, hardware: phone cameras now read QR codes natively. No app to install, no ritual to learn. A technology survives when its friction disappears, and this friction is long gone.
The Pakistani layer
Raast — the State Bank's instant payment system — puts QR payments on shop counters, with JazzCash, Easypaisa and the banking apps all speaking the same square. Small merchants who never managed a card machine print one code and get paid. Restaurant menus, utility bills and property listings on Zameen all carry them now. Cash on delivery still rules e-commerce, but the QR is how the shopkeeper two streets from you collects.
If you run a business
- Use dynamic codes, which let you change the destination after printing. Static codes are forever — print ten thousand flyers with a wrong link and they are landfill.
- The landing page must load fast on 4G. A code that opens a slow page teaches people never to scan yours again.
- Say why. "Scan for" a menu, a warranty, a discount — codes with a reason get scanned; naked squares get ignored.
- Placement beats cleverness. High, clean and well-lit wins over cute.
Quishing — the scam to know
The dark side is sticker fraud: crooks paste their own QR over a shop's real one, and you pay the wrong "merchant." Nothing about the square warns you. So check that the payment screen shows the right business name before you tap confirm, and read what your phone actually resolved before opening it — the same instinct you already use with SMS links.
The same square carries terrible weight elsewhere. In Gaza, aid distribution has run through voucher codes — a family's flour decided by a scan, technology rationed down to survival.
And none of our magic squares work with a dead phone, so every itinerary we issue goes out twice — e-tickets in your inbox, hotel vouchers on WhatsApp, and a printed backup in your travel folder, because batteries die at the worst hour in a foreign airport. HTG Travels, the Sialkot desk's version of defensive engineering.
