Ontario company offers app to provide easy access to QR codes for businesses

Now that proof of vaccination QR codes are available for everyone in the province, and in other jurisdictions like British Columbia and the Yukon Territories, there's a company that is offering an easy process for those entering businesses to show proof of vaccination.

The QRolo app was designed to be a customer-friendly app to Verify Ontario's validation app. It was created by a company called Social Path. 

“When the government’s program was introduced, the general understanding was that there would be a consumer app that people would show upon entrance, which is not the case,” said Peter Kirkpatrick, Principal at Social Path. 

Kirkpatrick said that this was mainly created for an audience of two – him and his wife. He said that they just put together this program last week. 

“I shared it with a couple of friends during development and everyone thought it was a nifty idea and they wished the government put something like this out as well. That's when I thought I'd wrap it in a brand and load it up to the app store,” he said. 

Kirkpatrick said it's a fairly simple solution to helping people be able to scan their proof of vaccination documents.

“For a family entering an establishment, there is still going to be an awkward delay while everyone searches for printouts or photos among the hundreds on their phones. QRolo becomes the easy way to store and present QR codes for your family, or group. While QRolo is not associated with Service Ontario nor the Verify Ontario app, it is a perfect customer companion application.”

Kirkpatrick said it's as simple as printing out your government issued QR codes, scanning them into QRolo, name them, and swipe through one-by-one when you need them.

He mentions that people shouldn't be worried about your information leaving the app. 

“It's a one-trick pony,” he said, “it's important to note that nothing that scans into QRolo ever leaves the app. Any of your information is only on your device.”

It was developed for Apple in mind first because those are the devices that he and his family own. Once he put a brand together for the app, it took a couple of days for Apple to approve it on the app store.

“If it starts to take off and people are interested in it then it's built-in 'React Native' which allows me to roll it out as an Android app as well and we can do that fairly easily. We are just waiting to see if people take an interest in it then we will take it from there.” 

He mentions that the development of this app was fairly easy with the team that he worked with. 

“I don't want to make it sound like I'm a single guy just pounding away at my keyboard,” he said, “it's something that if you have the resources available and expertise on your team, you can roll it out fairly quickly. It depends on the complexity of it.”

Kirkpatrick said that he did a proof of concept of this app of something that you can scan directly from your driver's license or health card where you can ping to a government server and it gives your vaccination status that way. 

“People could just be showing their ID but with that being said, with the data sets and challenges of compliance that government would have to deal with I can see how that could be difficult but in my mind that would be even a simpler solution,” he said. 

You can download the app for $1.39 right here.