Most QR generators bake your destination URL directly into the matrix. The code points at play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=.... Forever. If your store URL changes, your campaign URL changes, or you decide to do an iOS-first launch, every printed poster turns into a tiny lie.

AppRoute QR codes do not work like that. The matrix encodes your short URL — getapproute.com/your-app — and nothing else. The destination is decided server-side, at scan time, by the same routing pipeline that handles every click.

01A scan is a click

When a phone's camera resolves a QR code, the OS hands the URL to a browser, which fires an HTTP request. From our side it looks identical to someone tapping the same link on Twitter. That means the scan inherits, automatically:

  • OS routing — Android cameras go to Play, iOS cameras to the App Store.
  • Country rules — a German scan picks up the German store URL.
  • Click caps and expiry — a scanned link past its cap shows the same inactive page as a clicked one.
  • Password gates — yes, even from a QR. The gate works the same.
  • Analytics — bot and preview detection, UTM capture, the lot.
Field note

We saw a customer reprint 18,000 conference badges last year because their old shortener had baked a Play Store URL into the QR. They asked us if we could fix it after the print run. We could not. With AppRoute they would have edited the link in the dashboard and gone home.

02Scan-vs-click attribution

We do not pretend we can tell every scan apart from every click — the user-agent of a phone camera handoff and a tap from a chat app overlap. But for the cases where we can (iOS camera UA strings, scan-specific referrer chains), we tag the click as source=scan in your analytics. You also get an optional toggle to inject default UTMs on every scan-resolved click so your downstream attribution stack picks them up cleanly.

03Making the code look like the brand

Pro and Team accounts can customise the QR appearance per link. Three things are tunable today:

  1. Foreground colour. Anything with at least 4:1 contrast against the background, validated on save.
  2. Eye shape. Square, rounded, or circular. Square is the highest scan-rate at distance; rounded looks the friendliest in print.
  3. Centre logo. Drop in a square PNG or SVG. We re-encode the matrix at a higher error-correction level so the logo never breaks the scan.

Free accounts get the default AppRoute mark, which is also a working QR — just without the per-link customisation.

04What you can download

  • PNG at any of 8 sizes — every plan. Good for slide decks, Slack, anything pixel-based.
  • SVG — Pro and Team. The right format for posters, signage, and screen-prints.
  • PDF — Pro and Team. Comes with crop marks if you tick the box.

If you are planning a print campaign, do yourself one favour: scan the proof yourself, from the actual distance and angle a real customer will. Posters that are 3m up scan differently from a screen on your desk. Everything else AppRoute will get right for you.