Which one should I pick for a new project?

That depends entirely on what you're building. These are two completely different libraries for different purposes:

journeyapps/zxing-android-embedded is for Android barcode scanning. Choose this if you need to:

• Scan barcodes (QR codes, UPC, etc.) in an Android app
• Embed a barcode scanner into your app's UI
• Generate barcodes as images

netflix/hystrix is for fault tolerance and latency management in distributed systems. Choose this if you need to:

• Add circuit breaker patterns to service calls
• Handle cascading failures in microservices
• Implement request caching and fallback logic

If you're building an Android barcode scanning app, use zxing-android-embedded. The RepoPilot analysis flags it as "GO — Healthy across all four use cases," indicating it's stable and well-maintained. It supports Android SDK 24+ by default, with fallback options for SDK 19+ [README.md lines 234-238].

If you're building a JVM service that calls other services, use Hystrix. It provides annotation-based circuit breaking via @HystrixCommand in the javanica module [hystrix-contrib/hystrix-javanica/README.md], making it easy to add resilience patterns.

They solve orthogonal problems—you might even use both in the same project (Hystrix in your backend, zxing-android-embedded in your mobile frontend).

FOLLOW_UPS:

• What does your application need to accomplish?
• Are you building Android or backend services?
• Do you need both barcode scanning and fault tolerance?