Considering only 5 million americans annually use QR Codes but in just China alone over 60 million qr codes are scanned every hour is the issue...it's culture tied to value.
You can't force people to engage in a way that they see no real reason to give the landscape...but for my product we are in 174 countries and mobile phone growth is 80% outside of the us and in emerging markets.
So if you only service San Francisco or Boston their isn't a huge need but if you are thinking internationally QR Codes are actually a new generation of barcodes...they are the same thing as a barcode just 2 dimensional.
It's like saying barcodes will cease to exist in stores in 2 years...they have evolved in the form of QR Codes....and will continue to evolve given we can now store a huge amount of information onto QR Codes/2D barcodes that we couldn't with 1 dimensional ones.
It's all about perspective and who you're serving really. Design is about respecting peoples culture, it's about being relevant. We wouldn't complain about translating our app into another language if users don't speak english but that's just the thing only 17% of the app store is multilingual.
Report
Curious to hear perspectives on where QR codes are best utilized. I have embedded them in various marketing promotions and have never had a take-up rate that justified the effort. Will a QR code with an image improve the performance? Using them as a business card is clever but business cards as a format are declining in relevance. Using QR codes to pair devices with services (e.g. Multi-factor auth) is a great use case but highly utilitarian, meaning you will use them irrespective of the format they are presented in.
Castle
Relayo
Dropbox DocSend