Been getting into Android a good bit lately. Some for work, some not. Anyway I needed a way to scan a barcode on the phone in order to lookup some information for an application I am designing. However as I found out reading a barcode is not a part of the Android SDK. The SDK does support taking pictures and so forth but no analysis or translation.

After some research I found out how to pull it off on the phone; you can do it by accessing an external barcode scanning application using and SDK concept called Intent. The main barcode scanning application (called "Barcode Scanner" in the market) supports returning scanned codes back to other applications, which makes this relatively straight forward to accomplish. I haven't tried this yet in code but the thing I wonder about is if the Android SDK (or the market) handles application dependences or if that is something you have to handle yourself inside of the application.

Details on getting a scanned code into your application in Android using Intent is detailed in the link below.

http://code.google.com/p/zxing/wiki/ScanningViaIntent

The main project for the Android barcode scanner application is below.

http://code.google.com/p/zxing/

I can't see any reason why this application shouldn't be a default application within the software stack and fully integrated into the SDK. It is a top notch application and open source (not sure if the licenses would be compatible).