I don't think it would work either. Take an app that needs, say, wake locks, Internet access, and SMS access. Say further than none of them is strictly required

I don't think it would work either. Take an app that needs, say, wake locks, Internet access, and SMS access. Say further than none of them is strictly required. Now imagine that users can deny this access on a per-permission basis. Now instead of having one app to test, you have 2 ^ 3. It's not as easy as using existing error codes, because some of these things normally don't break -- in which case it would be excusable to have fairly basic error handling. Displaying a message and allowing the user to restart the app is a fair distance (in terms of app complexity) from being required to produce an app that not only keeps running but does "the right thing" for all possible degradations of required permissions. EDIT: I don't meant to sound pessimistic. I do really like the idea, but it seems like it would make the dev / test cycle a lot longer.