I just transferred a friend's iphone the other day and noticed this animated pattern. I presumed the QR-like code was just to transfer authentication so that the two phones could establish a secure wifi connection, since the QR recognition is fairly instantaneous and you don't have to keep the camera on the animation for long. (the process does ask you to keep the phones close, so the later transfer is probably by bluetooth, as you say)
One (possible) advantage could be that the animated nature means that someone taking a photograph of the animation won't capture enough data to steal the whole payload? And the use of tiny pixels might mean that even a video capture from anywhere but up-close might not have enough fidelity (after compression) to read the encoding either?
One (possible) advantage could be that the animated nature means that someone taking a photograph of the animation won't capture enough data to steal the whole payload? And the use of tiny pixels might mean that even a video capture from anywhere but up-close might not have enough fidelity (after compression) to read the encoding either?