unsolicited suggestion, but so you don't need to dust off android studio hopefully
@codl depending on what the thing is, sometimes you can use things like termux (and tasker if you want it to interact with the gui parts of your phone)
...it's absolutely *bonkers* that using a cli on a phone is just legitimately more convenient sometimes, but i can't even count the number of times the answer to "i want to do x" was "write a ruby script and connect it to a widget"
unsolicited suggestion
@codl actually, now that i think about it, are you familiar with how android reads qr codes natively in its camera now? (i ask because it took me an embarrassingly long time to discover that)
basically, if they open their camera and point it at a qr, a little popup appears at the bottom that lets them visit links and read text
(sorry if this is starting to channel reply-guy energy, i just don't like the idea of you getting frustrated at this if you didn't know about this)
re unsolicited suggestion
@codl ah dang
if that doesn't work, then i feel like the best bet for something ad-free would probably be google lens: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.ar.lens
hopefully one of those two things can save you some headache. it's always fun being tasked with finding things like this for people who aren't tech-savvy :s
especially in environments that are as subtly user-hostile as app stores can be--since they mean a lot of exhausting work to vet things you've never interacted with before
re unsolicited suggestion
@thingywott i've seen it but the phone in question is old and no longer updated and i'm pretty sure its stock camera app doesn't do that. also i'm 50km away so i can't really check. but i did ask them to check