The State of Connected Products in 2026: What the Data Says
Key Takeaways
- 92% of brands have already begun embedding NFC into products or have confirmed roadmap plans to do so within twelve months, according to Pragmatic Semiconductor's 2026 survey.
- The EU Digital Product Passport Registry goes live July 19, 2026 — yet 34% of EU-scope manufacturers have not begun DPP preparation.
- The connected product platform market has fragmented into four distinct categories: QR platforms, NFC authentication, DPP compliance, and full product experience platforms.
- Three simultaneous pressures — regulation, customer engagement, and first-party data — are driving adoption at different velocities and at different levels of the organisation.
Nine out of ten brands are embedding NFC into products or have active plans to do so within the next twelve months. That single figure — from a Pragmatic Semiconductor survey conducted earlier this year — tells you everything about the velocity of change in the connected product space. What was a niche capability for luxury goods two years ago is now a standard expectation across appliances, tools, apparel, and industrial equipment.
But adoption statistics only tell part of the story. The more interesting question is why brands are moving now, and whether the platforms they're choosing can actually deliver what the market demands. This is an attempt at a definitive mid-year snapshot: where the data points, where the gaps are, and where the market is heading for the rest of 2026.
QR Code Adoption: From Novelty to Infrastructure
Uniqode's State of QR Codes 2026 report — released in March and drawing on more than 500 data points — confirms what practitioners already sense on the ground: dynamic QR codes have crossed the infrastructure threshold. They are no longer marketing experiments; they are product delivery mechanisms.
Key findings from the report include accelerating scan volumes across retail and manufacturing, rising enterprise deployments tied to post-purchase journeys, and a clear shift from static to dynamic codes that can be updated after print. The latter is particularly significant for manufacturers: a QR code printed on packaging during production can be retargeted to a warranty registration flow at launch, a support hub six months later, and a spare parts catalogue at end-of-warranty — all without changing the physical label.
What QR Alone Cannot Do
The Uniqode report also highlights the ceiling. QR codes require active user intent — a customer must see the code, decide to scan it, and follow through. For authentication, anti-counterfeiting, and supply chain verification, that passive tap experience matters more than any scan conversion rate. That is where NFC is closing the gap.
NFC Embedding: The 92% Signal
The Pragmatic Semiconductor survey is blunt: 92% of brands have already begun embedding NFC into products or will do so within the next year. This is not aspiration — it is confirmed roadmap activity across the brands surveyed. NFC chip costs have fallen below $0.15 per unit at volume, according to industry cost benchmarks, while smartphone NFC support has reached near-universal levels — removing the two primary barriers that previously limited the technology to premium product tiers.
The driver is a combination of falling NFC chip costs (now below $0.15 per unit at volume), smartphone NFC support reaching near-universal levels, and the growing need for tap-to-verify authentication that QR codes structurally cannot provide. Premium apparel brands were early adopters; the technology is now moving into power tools, HVAC equipment, consumer electronics, and medical devices.
What 92% Means for Laggards
If nine in ten of your competitors are embedding NFC, the question is no longer whether to do it — it is whether your software stack can activate the hardware once it is in the product. An inert NFC chip is a sunk cost. A chip connected to a live product experience, a warranty record, or an anti-counterfeit verification engine is a strategic asset. The gap between those two outcomes is entirely a software problem.
The DPP Regulatory Wave: A Hard Deadline Approaching
The most consequential connected-product event of 2026 is not a product launch or a platform IPO. It is a regulatory date: July 19, 2026 — the day the EU Digital Product Passport Registry goes live.
Under the EU's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), the DPP Registry will serve as the central infrastructure through which product passport data must flow for regulated product categories. Batteries are the first category in scope. Textiles, electronics, and construction products follow in subsequent waves.
The current state of manufacturer preparedness is alarming. 34% of EU-scope manufacturers have not started DPP preparation — this with fewer than four weeks remaining before the Registry opens. The European Commission's own impact assessments for ESPR estimate that non-compliant products could face border rejection or removal from EU market shelves, with penalties varying by member state but averaging several percentage points of annual turnover for persistent violations. For many of these companies, "starting" means not just selecting a platform but also completing data audits, mapping supply chain traceability, and building the technical integrations that feed passport data upstream to the Registry.
Why Compliance Is the New Acquisition Driver
For the connected product platform market, this regulatory pressure has created the clearest buying signal in the sector's history. When compliance has a hard deadline and a regulatory penalty attached, procurement cycles compress. Brands that were evaluating connected product platforms for their customer engagement ROI are now buying because their legal team told them to. That changes the competitive dynamic entirely — and it explains why platform providers positioned around DPP compliance are seeing their fastest-ever pipeline growth in Q2 2026.
For a deeper breakdown of what the Registry launch means operationally, see our article on the EU DPP Registry going live July 2026 and what manufacturers need to know.
The Platform Landscape: Four Distinct Categories
The connected product platform market has fragmented into four recognisable segments, each solving a different slice of the problem. Understanding the distinctions matters — buying the wrong category of platform is an expensive mistake.
| Category | What It Solves | Representative Platforms |
|---|---|---|
| QR Platforms | Dynamic QR code generation, scan analytics, landing page routing | Flowcode, Uniqode, Beaconstac |
| NFC Authentication | Tap-to-verify, anti-counterfeiting, supply chain authentication | Scantrust, TrackMatriX |
| DPP Compliance | Digital Product Passport data structuring and Registry integration | Circularise, SAP DPP |
| Full Product Experience | Connected product identity, post-purchase journeys, warranty, support, commerce, compliance | BrandedMark, Registria, Brij |
QR Platforms
Flowcode, Uniqode, and Beaconstac serve brands that need scalable, analytics-rich QR infrastructure. They excel at campaign management, scan attribution, and dynamic redirect logic. They are not designed to manage a product's full lifecycle or serve as the system of record for warranty data, service history, or DPP compliance — but for marketing teams deploying high-volume QR campaigns, they are mature, capable tools.
NFC Authentication Platforms
Scantrust and TrackMatriX address the authentication and anti-counterfeiting use case with NFC and secure QR. Their strength is supply chain provenance — they can verify that a product is genuine and trace it through a distribution chain. They are purpose-built for brand protection rather than consumer engagement or post-purchase experience management.
DPP Compliance Platforms
Circularise and SAP's DPP offering approach the problem from the regulatory and data governance angle. They are strong on data model structuring, lifecycle assessment inputs, and Registry integration workflows. For large enterprises already running SAP, the SAP DPP tooling offers obvious integration advantages. The trade-off is that these platforms are typically not designed to serve consumer-facing product experiences.
Full Product Experience Platforms
BrandedMark, Registria, and Brij each take a broader view: the connected product should not just be verifiable or trackable, it should sustain an ongoing relationship between manufacturer and owner. Registria has a long history in warranty registration and loyalty programs for consumer goods. Brij focuses on the unboxing and onboarding moment. BrandedMark takes a connected product platform approach that spans the full product lifecycle — identity, warranty registration, self-service support, spare parts commerce, and DPP compliance — in a single system, built for serialised products at scale.
What Is Actually Driving Adoption in 2026
When you strip away the marketing language, three distinct drivers are pulling brands into the connected product space — and they arrive in a specific order.
1. Regulation First
DPP compliance is the forcing function for a significant portion of new platform deployments in 2026. Brands do not adopt connected product infrastructure because they want to — they adopt it because July 19 is on the calendar and their legal team has been cc'd on the RFP. The compliance driver has a hard ROI case (avoid regulatory penalties) and a hard deadline (the Registry goes live whether you are ready or not).
2. Customer Engagement Second
Once the infrastructure exists to serve a compliant DPP, forward-thinking product and marketing teams ask the obvious question: if the product already has a digital identity, what else can we do with it? Warranty registration, self-service support, and loyalty programs become low-marginal-cost additions on top of compliance infrastructure. The data from these engagement layers is a secondary return on an investment that regulation already justified.
3. Data Third
The deepest, longest-horizon value is the data. Most manufacturers selling through retail channels have no direct relationship with the end customer. They do not know who owns their products, where those products are, how they are being used, or when they are likely to need replacement or servicing. Connected product data closes that gap — but it is typically the third reason organisations invest, not the first.
For a close look at exactly which data signals most manufacturers are leaving on the table today, see our piece on product data you are not collecting.
Predictions for H2 2026
Several things are highly likely to happen between now and the end of the year.
The DPP Registry goes live July 19 — and the real test begins. The first compliance wave will reveal which platforms can actually deliver Registry integration versus which ones claimed DPP-readiness prematurely. Expect a round of emergency platform migrations in Q3.
Additional product categories will be formally mandated. The European Commission has signaled that textiles and electronics DPP requirements are on an accelerating timeline. Brands in those sectors watching from the sidelines are running out of runway.
Platform market consolidation accelerates. A market with four distinct categories and dozens of point solutions cannot sustain itself indefinitely. Acquisition conversations between QR/NFC authentication players and full-product-experience platforms are already underway. The end state is likely a smaller number of integrated platforms and a larger number of niche tools that serve specific verticals.
NFC becomes table stakes for premium products. The 92% figure from the Pragmatic Semiconductor survey will likely look conservative by year-end. As manufacturing line integration becomes simpler and chip costs continue to fall, NFC embedding will migrate from premium positioning to baseline expectation across durable goods.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a connected product platform and how does it differ from a QR code tool?
A QR code tool generates scannable codes and tracks scan analytics. A connected product platform treats each physical product as a digital entity with its own identity, history, and lifecycle. It manages what happens after the scan — warranty registration, customer onboarding, support interactions, spare parts commerce, and compliance data. The distinction matters because a QR code tool cannot serve as the system of record for a product's digital product passport, and it cannot sustain an ongoing customer relationship across multiple touchpoints over the product's useful life.
How much time do manufacturers have to prepare for EU DPP compliance?
For batteries — the first regulated category — the EU Digital Product Passport Registry goes live July 19, 2026. For manufacturers in scope, that deadline is immediate. Textiles and electronics will follow in subsequent regulatory waves, with timelines that the European Commission is expected to formalise in H2 2026. Manufacturers selling into the EU market should treat DPP readiness as an active compliance obligation, not a future planning item.
Does BrandedMark handle both consumer engagement and DPP compliance in one platform?
Yes. BrandedMark is built around the concept of a per-product digital identity — a serialised, unique record for each physical unit. That same identity layer serves consumer-facing experiences (warranty registration, self-service support, spare parts ordering) and compliance workflows (DPP data structuring, GS1 Digital Link, audit trail). Manufacturers do not need to run separate systems for engagement and compliance; the underlying product record serves both purposes. The connected product platform overview covers the architecture in more detail.
The Bottom Line
The connected product market in 2026 is not a single trend — it is three simultaneous pressures (regulation, engagement, data) arriving at different velocities and driving purchasing decisions at different levels of the organisation. Compliance is buying for legal reasons. Product teams are buying for customer experience reasons. Data and analytics leaders are buying for insight reasons.
The platforms that win this market will be the ones that serve all three buyers without requiring them to maintain three separate systems. That is the case for a full-stack approach — and it is why the platform landscape is consolidating in that direction, regardless of where any individual vendor started.
For manufacturers evaluating their options now, the most important question is not which platform has the best QR analytics or the most compelling DPP data model. It is which platform can grow alongside the full scope of what a connected product programme eventually becomes — from compliance checkbox to active customer relationship engine.