When to use it
Business cards, conference badges, email signatures printed on stationery, the back of a lanyard. A vCard code lets someone save your details in two taps instead of typing them, and it works with no internet connection because the data is inside the code.
How it behaves on phones
iPhone: the Camera app shows an “Add contact” banner. Tapping it opens a new contact sheet with every recognised field filled in. Fields the iPhone does not understand are silently dropped, which is why version 3.0 is the safe choice.
Android: most Android scanners show the parsed card with an “Add to contacts” button. Some show the raw text first and let the user pick which fields to keep.
Common mistake
Adding a postal address, a second phone, a fax number, a note and social links. Each line pushes the code up a version. A five field card fits version 8 at about 49 modules; a ten field card can hit version 13 at 69 modules, which will not print cleanly on a business card.
Gotchas
Field limits. There is no hard limit in the standard, but the code has one. At level M a version 10 code holds 213 bytes. Name, organisation, title, one phone, one email and one web address usually land between 180 and 230 bytes. Trim the organisation name and drop the title if you are over.
Versions. Write VERSION:3.0. Version 2.1 uses a different character encoding and drops accented names on some phones. Version 4.0 changes the phone field to TEL;VALUE=uri:tel:+1..., which not every scanner handles.
Line endings. The standard asks for CRLF, but every phone accepts plain LF. QR Studio writes the version scanners expect.
Accents. Encode the text as UTF-8. Older scanners may show “Ren?” for “René”, which is the scanner’s fault, not the code’s. There is no fix except a plain ASCII fallback in FN.
Semicolons in names. The N field uses semicolons as separators. A company name such as Smith; Jones & Co in ORG needs the semicolon escaped as \;.
Try it in QR Studio
QR Studio has a vCard form that fills in N and FN for you, escapes special characters and shows the resulting version before you export, so you can see whether the code will fit your card.
Print advice
Level M. Going to H makes a big code bigger still and a vCard is already dense. On a business card allow at least 2.5 cm and ask the printer for 300 dpi or better; 3 cm is safer. On a badge or poster print it larger and add “Scan to save contact” beside it so people know why it is there.
Try it yourself
Fill in a contact, watch the raw text appear line by line, and check the code version before you export.