In web development there is this notion of Progressive Enhancement [1]. It basically means that if certain functionality is not available you either disable the

In web development there is this notion of Progressive Enhancement [1]. It basically means that if certain functionality is not available you either disable the features that make use of it or you implement an alternative means of making the functionality work. I understand that permissions are a little bit different but I believe that a similar approach would work with permissions as well assuming that Android would supply a new advanced permissions sub system. With this, if an app isn't granted a specific permission it can either disable the feature (maybe making clear to the user that this is the case) or implement some other alternative functionality. E.g. an app hasn't been given the permission to read a user's current geo-location. In that scenario the app could ask the user to manually enter a location (e.g. by selecting a position on a map). Within the current permissions system you could only doing with mocking, as you stated, which I personally find a bit of a hack and probably very confusion to the user. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement