When to use it
Small labels where a vCard will not fit, product tags with a support contact, event badges for an Android heavy audience. MeCard was designed by NTT DoCoMo for Japanese feature phones, so compactness was the whole point.
How it behaves on phones
iPhone: the Camera app recognises MECARD: and offers “Add contact”. Name, phone and email come through reliably. Address and URL are hit and miss depending on iOS version, and there is no title or company field for it to read.
Android: most Android scanners parse MeCard fully and show an “Add to contacts” button. Google Lens handles it well.
Common mistake
Writing the name as N:Ada Lovelace. MeCard expects surname then given name with a comma between them, N:Lovelace,Ada. Get it wrong and the contact saves with the wrong sort order, or with the whole name in the surname field.
Gotchas
No title, no organisation. The original format has no field for either. Many scanners accept ORG: anyway, but iPhone does not. If a job title matters, use vCard.
Escaping. Colons, semicolons, commas and backslashes inside a value must be escaped with a backslash. An email address never contains those, but a NOTE or ADR might.
Address order. ADR takes seven comma separated parts: PO box, room, house number, city, prefecture, postal code, country. Most Western scanners squash them into one line.
Size comparison. The example above is 118 characters and fits version 6 at level M, 41 modules wide. The same contact as a vCard is closer to 200 characters and needs version 9 or 10, 53 to 57 modules. That is the difference between a code that prints at 2 cm and one that needs 3 cm.
Try it in QR Studio
QR Studio offers both MeCard and vCard from the same contact form, so you can switch formats and compare the size of the two codes before you export.
Print advice
Level M. The point of MeCard is a small code, so do not undo that with level H. A 2 cm code on a label or the corner of a business card is realistic if the printer is 300 dpi. Keep a clear quiet zone of four modules around it, and put a plain text phone number nearby for anyone whose scanner shows the raw string.
Try it yourself
Enter a name, phone and email, then toggle between MeCard and vCard to see how much smaller the code gets.