It often recognizes barcodes wrongly and changes its opinion sometimes 2-3 times per second. It starts to be a problem while editing, because generates many duplicates with wrong barcodes. For instance today while checking OPF website, I met this:
I’m almost sure it is the same product. Because pictures are made in are made in similar conditions in the same time (sorting on the website was based on add time). Barcodes are similar (they have 2 different digits), but not enough to be just different products from one collection (these 2 digits are far from each other). And front picture of the first product has identical name as the second product.
So I guess the next thing happened: someone firstly scanned this product, got the message “This product is not in the OFF DB” and added it. After that the same user scanned this product again, but in this time the app recognized product barcode wrongly and sent to the user, “This product is not in the DB” message again, the user didn’t understand what happened and added it anew with barcode, that was recognized by the app wrongly.
I personally always re-check product barcode on its package and its recognized version in the app, before I start to add it. Both because I know the app’s scanner doesn’t work properly and because I understand barcode is one of the most important product identifiers in your DB, so it is important to double check it. But general contributors, especially contributors without OFF account will trust to the app scanner without double checking it. So it is important to make as stable as it is possible.
From open source scanners I know GitHub - markusfisch/BinaryEye: Yet another barcode scanner for Android · GitHub which is much more stable and fast than native OFF solution, so I prefer to use it to scan my barcodes while adding new products. After that I just copy them and paste to the search field in the OFF app, still with double check.
What else should be improved?
The barcode number should be shown while all adding process and be editable until it is saved to the DB. Right now I don’t see the product barcode number after I passed the first “This products still is not in our product DB” page. It means that I can’t check it after that if it is correct or not. So if I’m unsure, I need to cancel all my entered data and to start add process anew.
I believe it should be something like that
