The door moves faster when the ID reads itself

It is out now on the App Store, listed as Bodyguard: ID Scanner Pro, and free. iOS only for the moment — there is no Android version.

The first release is free. No purchases, no adverts, no trial that expires. A hardware scanner starts a few hundred dollars per door and this costs nothing, which is the whole argument. If paid features arrive later, the free version keeps working and you will hear about it before anything changes.

Yes. Serving a minor typically means a fine, a suspension, or losing the licence outright. But most US states also have an affirmative defence: if you can show you electronically verified the document at the door, the venue is shielded from administrative penalty even when the forgery was good enough to fool a person. That defence rests on having the record — which is the part a paper log, or a doorman doing date arithmetic in his head, cannot give you. Confirm the specifics with your own licensing authority; this is not legal advice.

Two ways. It takes the date maths away from a person standing in a dark, loud room at 1am, which is where most honest mistakes happen. And it leaves a timestamped record of every check and its result — the audit trail you put in front of a liquor board or an inspector to show due diligence. Requirements differ by state and country, so confirm with yours.

Fast enough. The PDF417 barcode on the back of every US and Canadian licence decodes in a fraction of a second on any recent iPhone — the camera frameworks are built for exactly this. The dedicated scanner sold for this job is a single-purpose device you buy, charge, carry and eventually replace, doing something the phone already in your pocket does.

Because a card is two things to forge, and most fakes only bother with the one you look at. The front gets copied well; the barcode behind it gets the encoding wrong. So the checks are structural — does the barcode agree with the printed front, is the field syntax right for that issuing state, is the expiry logic coherent, has the document been altered. It catches the common ones. It will not catch a well-made forgery, and any product claiming otherwise is selling you something. It is a strong first filter, not a replacement for a trained door.

A patron of age gets scanned, walks in, then passes their ID back down the queue to an underage friend. Flag the document and that phone recognises it on the next scan, so the door sees the reuse instead of waving it through. It is matched by an irreversible code rather than the stored document number — and it works on that device only, because there is no sync.

It never needs one. There is no network code in the app at all — age calculation, barcode parsing and your flagged documents all resolve on the device. Basements, warehouses, festival fields: a queue cannot stall on a connection the app never asks for.

No, and it is worth being plain about it. Each phone keeps its own flags, matched with a key generated on that device — a flag raised at the main entrance is not visible at the VIP door. That is the direct cost of having no servers, and for a multi-door venue it is a real limitation rather than a detail. If it is what your venue needs, tell us: sync means building a back end, and it should be venues asking for it that decides whether that happens.

Age verification for alcohol, tobacco and venue entry is permitted in most jurisdictions. What varies is what you are allowed to keep afterwards, and for how long — venues get caught out on retention, not on the scan itself. The safe posture is to read the document, derive the answer, and not hold identifying detail you have no reason to hold. Rules differ by state and country; confirm yours. This is not legal advice.

No. The app has no network code, so nothing can leave the phone. By default a scan record holds the time, the outcome and the reason — no name, date of birth, document number or address. There is a setting to store those details if your licensing regime requires it, off unless you turn it on, and turning it back off erases them from past scans. Records delete themselves on a retention window you set. The privacy policy sets all of this out in plain language.

It gives you a contemporaneous, timestamped record of checks performed, which is what most authorities want to see. Requirements differ by state and country, so confirm with yours. This is not legal advice.