I also found this pop-up add behaviour Saturday (6th) morning. I distinctly remember looking at this app last year when a different barcode scanner had an issue and it was not owned by "the space team" then,maybe a takeover? App now uninstalled

The one I remember being popular before on Android was the "zxing" one: it's still on the Play Store but has tons of recent reviews complaining about adware... confused users (and/or competitors taking advantage) leaving reviews on the wrong one?

The zxing one seems to not have been updated in years (plus it's still on the store).

Right. Space Team's app was a fork of the zxing demo app updated to newer SDK versions, but with the same name and basically identical interface. It had a malicious version uploaded recently, and was nuked by Google.

People then found the original, that looks the same, and started leaving negative reviews, attacking the "maintainer" (who does not really maintain it anymore, since Google no longer pays him to do so and it is no longer possible to update for the play store without some substantial code changes to target the newer android API versions) on Github, etc.

Glad you brought this one up. I also had the app you mentioned installed and noticed pop-up ads in Chrome.

I immediatly uninstalled the app and left a review. Like many other negative reviews I received some copy-pasted response stating they only have some in app ads.

It is beyond me that the developers just lie about including malware in their app while it is so obvious they are.