Google should be able to detect this by looking for very similar byte code. They could whitelist shared libraries, or rule them out with some other heuristic. It wouldn't need to be perfect, just good enough to make the human part of enforcement manageable.
That could be one way Google could handle it, but if they do it this way, they have to maintain a huge byte code DB of all Apps, not seems to be a very efficient way.
Providing obfuscation support in the build package or adding extra security layer in the Android platform itself is more manageable i guess..
This is the company that maintains a huge copy of the entire internet, and runs queries (including "is this site just a clone of another one?" type queries) on it, so on a technical level, they can probably do it. Of course, whether it's worth it to them to do so is another story.
That's definitely true, technically it could be done, similar to some plagiarism detection software used in academia to tell the level of similarities between publications. But I still think tweaking on the client side would be a more cost-efficient solution... but I agree, they are Google, they should always have free servers and cpu powers to throw in :)
