App Store QR Code

What the scan should lead to

Ideally, scanning the code doesn’t dump someone straight onto the App Store or Google Play — it goes through a short redirect step that checks whether the phone is iOS or Android and sends them to the correct listing automatically. Done well, that redirect happens instantly and invisibly; the person never notices they were routed anywhere.

The mistake that quietly costs you installs

Pointing the code directly at one store — usually the App Store, since it’s often built first — is easily the most common error here, and it’s easy to miss because it “works” for whoever tests it on their own iPhone. Every Android user who scans that same code lands on a page with nothing to offer them, and almost none of them will manually search the right store afterward. You lose a real share of your potential installs without ever seeing an error.

Set up the split properly

A handful of free and low-cost link tools detect a visitor’s operating system and redirect iOS and Android traffic to their respective stores from one address. Point your QR code at that single smart link rather than at either store, and test it from both an iPhone and an Android phone before it goes anywhere public — this is the one thing worth verifying rather than assuming.

Where size matters less than clarity

Because the payload is just a short link, the code itself can be compact — 2-3cm is plenty on packaging or a shelf card viewed up close. A poster read from a couple of metres away needs to scale up with that distance instead of shrinking to fit a corner — the same tenth-of-the-viewing-distance rule applies here as for any other poster code. What matters more than size is a label that tells people what they’re getting: “Get the app” beats a bare code with no context, since an unexplained QR code is often ignored entirely regardless of size.