The reviews were immensely unhelpful. How can you give a 5-star review to an app, saying it "works perfectly" when you can't open it and see what it does?
More research was required. Fortunately, the Google is strong with this one, and I quickly found a TechCrunch article in which was buried this nugget "barcodes can later be reproduced in the form of infrared flashes". Now we're on to something, because the app description on the Google Play store says "The Beaming Service enables your device to beam (relay) barcodes ... to 1D red laser and image based scanners..." (excess marketing cruft elided) OK, now this is useful. Most 1D scanners cannot read barcodes from phone images, so if your retailer hasn't upgraded to a 2D scanner (which can also read QR codes), the barcodes still have to be entered by hand.
All in all, this appears to be a useful little technology. It's just unfortunate that the vendor can't seem to communicate this succinctly. It's also unfortunate that they chose to call it "beaming" when the same term is used to refer to NFC communication between phones. Confusing, no?
Great! But so many of the reviews mentioned the permissions in their objections. Since this app was pre-installed on my phone, I never had a chance to review them. Let's take a look:
- Contacts: find accounts on the device
- Location: approximate & GPS
- Phone: status & identity
- Other: full network access, run at startup, prevent sleeping, receive Internet data
At this point, I would love to use some choice expletives. Why does an app that relays a barcode via infrared flashes need my account information? Why does it need to know a location? Why does it need network access? If this is simply a driver to expose the barcode flashing technology to other apps, none of these permissions should be required.
Let's take a walk down memory lane to the year 2000 when a little barcode scanner called the CueCat made its appearance. Available for free at Radio Shack, this little device allowed you to scan barcodes in magazine and on commercial products. Those of us with large libraries of music, videos, or books thought it would be useful in finally cataloging our collections. However, suspicions were raised when it was discovered that every barcode scanned could be aggregated by Digital Convergence and connected to identifiable demographic data requested when registering the scanner.
Now I don't have proof that Mobeam is doing the same thing. But the permissions required are suspicious: especially when you consider that this "driver" could collect and report every barcode relayed by any app that uses it.
Perhaps if Mobeam were to limit the requested permissions on this service, I might be tempted to use it. Then again, I hardly use Key Ring anymore: most of the retailers who still have 1D scanners look up my account via phone number because it's easier. For now, this app goes on my disabled list.
