Both a QR-capable camera and a flashlight in the notification bar are in all my Android phones, and they've been for a very long time. I know the Nexus One didn't include it, but those will have problems with modern TLS anyway.
The problem is likely elsewhere. It wouldn't surprise me if many of these users are tricked into installing these apps. It is quite popular for malware to disguise itself as a legitimate app as to not raise suspicion.
Discoverability is just as much an issue as feature including. If you have to go into a special QR mode (which a lot of cameras did), you’re never going to use the feature, and it’s hard to break those mental models if the feature gets silently added in later iterations; you’re always going to remember that first encounter where something didn’t work seamlessly.
Indeed it is. It wasn't at all obvious on my phone that I could put a flashlight toggle on my notification bar, so for a long time I still kept the old Motorola DroidLight app, which, despite being unmaintained for a very long time, worked beautifully.
I have a pixel but i don't have qr scanning built in to the camera. It was at one point built into the "google vision" thing, but i haven't seen it in the ui for a while.
In a very google move, Google goggles was rebranded as Google lens and the Google goggles app stopped doing anything. As far as I know Google lens still does everything goggles did, including bar code/qr codes.
Both a QR-capable camera and a flashlight in the notification bar are in all my Android phones, and they've been for a very long time. I know the Nexus One didn't include it, but those will have problems with modern TLS anyway.
The problem is likely elsewhere. It wouldn't surprise me if many of these users are tricked into installing these apps. It is quite popular for malware to disguise itself as a legitimate app as to not raise suspicion.