Introducing… the UPCZilla mobile app!
It’s an idea we’ve been kicking around for a while but we finally got round to making it happen.
The idea of the appĀ is super-simple but deadly powerful! You go into a store to do your shopping, you pick up an item from the shelf and scan the barcode with the UPCZilla app, and within a few seconds a price comparison listing from the UPCZilla site will pop up showing how much the item costs online. If it’s cheaper, well, you can walk straight out of the store and just click through and buy it online!Ā The stores hate this app! š
Let me be honest, I (Mark, the ‘brains’ behind UPCZilla) am not an Android programmer, I have never even programmed an Android app before! Yes, only Android for now, sorry, we’ll get to iOS if there is demand. So it had to be really simple, but that’s good because there is no bloat – just a simple barcode price comparison function, no ads, no nagging to buy the pro version, nothing, just a few megs in size. But I think this could be a really powerful tool to carry around with you. Why pay more in-store!? Scan products like a ninja and buy them online if they are cheaper!
In effect this app is ‘just’ a short-cut to UPCZilla, and that’s all you need really, just a quick way to look up a product you find in-store. However, by definition this will only work with products that have proper UPC-A barcodes (though ISBNs will kind of work too) – which limits this to the US currently, and Canada to an extent. You also probably can’t scan supermarket own-brand products a lot of the time since they may not have a proper UPC, and won’t be sold online anyway, except by that same store, so there is no point really (think about it, why would Amazon or eBay have Walmart house brand products at a lower price anyway?).
Go and check out the UPCZilla Barcode Price Comparison app on the Play Store, and by all means leave us a review/feedback – just remember the limitations I mentioned up-front (I can already see people going “IT DOESN’T DO QR CODES, ONE STAR, UNINSTALLING!”). I’ve tested it as much as I could given that I don’t even live in the US and therefore only have a limited number of US products to scan and test, so I would like to hear people making real-world use of this!
Also check out our marketing blurb here.
I only do āapplesā… sound like a very usable app…
Yes, unfortunately it’s not practical for us to write an iOS version right now, mostly because we don’t have an iOS developer and are not sure if it’s worth financing it right now. Also, you have to develop on a Mac, we just don’t use Macs or have any. Maybe we’ll do it some time though, as there are many users we could reach that way…
Can’t download the app from the Google Play store, it says the app is for older version of Android. I’m using Android 12 and 13
Oh, wow, thanks for letting us know – looks like we need to update it, sorry for the inconvenience.
Hm, I have a Android 12 device and it works fine so it must be a v13 problem, will have to check it out, we are long overdue for an update anyway.