Sign a phone in by pointing its camera at the code

August 9, 2026

Signing a phone in used to mean leaving the app: show the pairing code on the computer, then hunt for the phone’s camera app to read it. The app can now read its own code.

Open a line to read the whole story behind it.

• New The sign-in screen offers to scan a pairing code with the camera, without leaving the app.

  The sign-in screen offers to scan a pairing code with the camera. Show a code on your computer under Signed-in devices, point the phone at it, and it lands on the same page it always did — naming the account and waiting for you to confirm before anything is paired. Nothing has changed about what a pairing code is or how long it lasts, and typing an email address and a password still works exactly as before. The offer only appears on a device that has a camera; without one, your phone’s own camera app opens the same page.

• New Every device under Signed-in devices can be given a code of its own, keeping its name and history.

  Every device under Signed-in devices can now be given a code of its own, for a phone that has been signed out or a browser on it that never was. It asks for your password, shows a QR beside that device, and scanning it signs the same phone back in — keeping the name you gave it, the printer its labels come out on, and its history, instead of arriving as a stranger and leaving a duplicate in the list. It replaces that device’s sign-in rather than adding a second one, so anything still using the old one is signed out.

• New A Scan page on the computer with the field already selected, for a handheld in a USB port.

  A Scan page on the computer, next to Search, with the field already selected — so a handheld scanner plugged into a USB port can be used without touching the mouse. Scan a printed label, a part number or a barcode off a box and it opens the record, exactly as scanning on a phone does. If nothing answers to the code, the page says so and shows you the code it read, and offers to add a product with that barcode already filled in. A scan that finds nothing used to drop you onto the phone screen instead, which is no longer the case.

• New Scanning with a handheld opens the record from anywhere on the computer, unless you are typing.

  You no longer have to be on the Scan page. Anywhere on the computer, as long as you are not typing into a box, scanning with a handheld opens the record straight away — so you can stand at a list of products, scan a shelf label, and be looking at that shelf. If the cursor is in a box the code goes into the box, exactly as before, which is how you scan a barcode into a form. Typing by hand never triggers it: it is the speed of a scanner that tells the two apart.

• New A help page on setting up a handheld scanner, including the keyboard layout everybody trips over.

  A help page on setting a handheld scanner up, alongside the ones on phones and labels. It covers leaving the scanner in keyboard mode, setting its suffix to Enter, and — the one that catches everybody — matching its keyboard layout to your computer, because a scanner set to the wrong country sends the wrong characters and every scan fails in a way that looks like this app being broken. The Scan page links straight to it.