vCard vs MECARD: Which QR Contact Card Format Wins

A “contact QR code” isn’t a special kind of QR code — it’s an ordinary code encoding a plain-text block in one of two competing formats. The phone’s camera app recognizes the structure, offers to save it as a new contact, and the format you chose decides whether that offer appears reliably or not at all.

vCard: the standardized option

vCard is defined by the IETF as RFC 6350 (version 4.0; version 3.0 remains widely used and equally well supported). A minimal contact block looks like this:

Because it’s a formal, registered standard, every modern iOS and Android camera recognizes the BEGIN:VCARD / END:VCARDwrapper and offers “Add to Contacts” without needing a third-party app. That reliability is the entire reason to prefer it.

MECARD: shorter, less consistently supported

MECARD is an older, unofficial format that originated with Japanese feature-phone QR readers. It packs the same information into a terser syntax:

MECARD:N:Doe,Jane;TEL:15551234567;EMAIL:[email protected];;

It produces a shorter string than an equivalent vCard block, which matters only at the margin — a few extra characters rarely push a contact card into a noticeably denser QR version. The real cost is compatibility: MECARD was never ratified by a standards body, and support outside Japan and Japan-influenced Android builds is inconsistent. Some Western camera apps decode it fine; others display it as inert text with no “save contact” prompt at all.

Which one to actually use

For a printed business card, a conference badge, or an email signature meant to be scanned by a general audience on unknown phones, vCard is the safer default — it’s the format every mainstream camera app was built to recognize. MECARD is worth considering only if you have a specific, confirmed reason: an audience you know is on Android devices with strong MECARD support, or an extremely tight character budget where every byte matters (rare in practice — vCard’s overhead is small enough that it almost never changes the printed code’s physical size at normal error-correction levels).

Whichever format you choose, the underlying square still follows the same ISO/IEC 18004 encoding rules covered in our standards guide — vCard and MECARD are payload conventions layered on top, not part of the QR specification itself.

Test before you print

A malformed block — a missing END:VCARD, a stray line break inside a field, a semicolon count that doesn’t match MECARD’s exact syntax — causes the scanner to fall back to showing raw text instead of offering to save a contact. Before sending a business-card design to print, scan the generated code on at least one iPhone and one Android device and confirm the “Add to Contacts” prompt actually appears, not just that the code scans at all.