Quote from Malwarebytes site: "Peter V. Jaspers-Fayer - Why does this article not contain the publisher and the icon of the app in question? There are many called "Barcode Scanner", and by omitting this information, you have caused unwarranted panic by users of innocent apps of the same name."The fact that Google allows applications on Google Play to have identical/duplicate names is a significant ongoing problem as it causes considerable confusion.
I'm not against apps that have similar functions having identical (duplicate) filenames as this stops developers having to dream up ridiculous names that have little or no bearing to an app's function but it would make sense to separate the apps in some simple way that users could easily identify. For instance, apps with identical names could be flagged in many ways such as, say, Google providing a sequence number to the end of the filename. And I'm sure there are many other suitable ways I've not thought of.
As for the fact that Google lets malware onto Google Play and that it has happened many times demonstrates the fact that Google doesn't consider the matter of highest importance. That's to say, keeping malware off users' Android phones is not as important as making money from its advertisers.
If keeping malware off apps were equally important to Google then this is malware would have unlikely escaped Google's monitoring, as Google has just about every technical measure at its disposal to monitor apps for malware—and I'd venture to say that even its AI technology could be brought bear.
Clearly, if both issues aren't of equal importance in Google's eyes then it raises questions as to why Google keeps changing or adding certain features to its Android operating system in the name of security but which annoy users (and in effect violate their privacy—in that users' data, etc are even more transparent to Google whether the user likes it or not).
Day by day, Google is proving itself to everyone to be more of a worry.
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Note: I'm one of those who have an app on my phone named 'Barcode scanner' and it took me a while to determine (fortunately) that the one I have installed is not the app in question.