Because that's like expecting Windows...

Funny you mention Windows, because that is kind of what it's like. If you're developing a Windows application you have to accept the possibility that -- for example -- the user might firewall your program (so making it add-supported won't necessarily work) and that there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

I should have certain hardware and permissions to the OS. If you feel you can't trust my application then don't install it.

You're one of those dumbass programmers who designs Windows applications that require Administrator access to run, aren't you?

It becomes a support nightmare and a functionality nightmare and a programming nightmare to try and code around every single user's specific desires as to what hardware/permissions I should access.

If accepting the inevitable reality that the user is going to decide what happens on his own device is a nightmare for you as a developer, then go find some other line of work. The world will be better off without your malware.

You ought to be able to re-download Play applications you've paid for anyway (unless you don't plan on reinstalling the Play Store, of course).

You misunderstand me. The setting in question was one within the app itself (referring to "there is a switch in their app to turn this off"), not the system setting. It's inherently and trivially possible for the app to show a switch that doesn't actually do anything.

I feel I must emphasize on this: it's all theory, I don't take any sides, but I can imagine different outcomes.

Totalitarian FUD is totalitarian FUD, whether you call it "theory" or not.

What is not theory is that we lived the "other outcome" from 1776 to mid-2001, and the terrorism rate was just fine.

(Note that the terrorism rate continued to be just fine since then; it was the "other outcome" interval that ended.)

... and then abolish the Department of Big Brother, right? 'Cause otherwise your proposal is evil and insane.

I assume by treason, you refer to things like providing aid / comfort to enemies of the United States. Things like providing arms to the Muslim Brotherhood....

Not even that. I mean that the NSA, with its Unconstitutional Orwellian agenda, is itself now an enemy of the United States, and that Obama has given the NSA aid and comfort by failing to disband and prosecute its leaders.

So Americans would accept that they don't get a say if, for example, China or Russia tries to do the same thing? Because, you know, it's lawful according to them?

It's not up to Americans whether they "accept" China or Russia's spying. That's China or Russia's decision (respectively); Americans' only recourse is to attempt to physically prevent it.

Regardless of country, if you don't like getting spied on by foreigners, the only thing you have to blame is your own country's counterintelligence agency's failure to prevent it.

Obtaining the necessary warrant might prove to be impossible without obtaining communication-based proof beforehand.

Then the target of the investigation goes free. This is the correct and reasonable outcome, by design.

But at the same time I can't figure a better way to prevent impactful, unlawful acts from happening (from terrorism to major drug smuggling and so on and so forth).

Then you don't prevent them. That is the cost of living in a free country, and it's an entirely reasonable one, which I, for one, am perfectly happy to pay.

And by "better" I don't necessarily mean "let's go full legal and there you have it" - that's probably way worse from an outcome perspective. What if (again, as I said above, theorizing here) the NSA stops collecting that data and within 3 years the amount of bombs going off increases tenfold, while at the same time drug usage increases by millions of souls, meat trafficking gets out of control, etc.? Then it will be widely regarded as being "the worst decision that could possibly be made".

That is nothing more than a load of fear-mongering totalitarian bullshit, without a shred of evidence to support it. (In other words, it isn't even a theory -- it's a hypothesis, and an exceptionally poor one.)

The higher national security, the greater the costs (and sacrifices of personal privacy). It's valid for pretty much every country in the world. A balance must be stricken, but weights on both platters are variable and subjective

In the United States we already struck that balance (weighted strongly towards freedom at the expense of security). Attempting to change that balance without the consent of the people (expressed via amending the Constitution) is treason.

Do you really think everyone that download those applications that enable access to this hidden code know what they are doing? People will download it because they saw it on the media, use it, and go to Google Play and start giving bad reviews for applications that have bad behaviour

In this case, the people who are too stupid to use it are also too stupid to know or care why they'd even want to in the first place. It's not as if this is a game or something; it's a settings menu. Nobody's installing it for fun.

what will happen if the access to the IMEI number is hidden giving fake numbers and for some reason a crap application used that to identify the user and for some reason privacy is broken, accessing data of other users?

You answered yourself. They key words were "crap application."

Also, I wish IMEI access was a disable-able permission. Either it isn't, or it's a permission that absolutely nothing on my phone has tried to request.

The bottom line is scenarios like you described, where restricting an app's permission could ever cause a worse problem, tend not to be plausible.

I remember they advised the Cyanogenmod team to not enable multi window feature for all applications because not all of them work without problems with dynamic screen sizes and they didn't want to alienate developers on Google Play with bad reviews for something that doesn't follow the Android APIs. There is a reason Samsung multi window feature only works with some applications and not all of them

I've never used either Cyanogenmod or Samsung's multi window feature, but I would have assumed it just reported the next-smaller screen size class (i.e., a 10-inch tablet in landscape mode would display two apps side-by-side by pretending to each app to be a 7-inch tablet in portrait mode). That sort of thing should be inherently compatible with all apps (at least, all apps that adhere to Google's UI standards).

Have you ever used the feature being discussed? It not only provides a list of what permissions the apps want (and switches to turn them on and off), it also tells you how long ago the app actually tried to use the permission. For example, on my Nexus 5, Chrome last used my location December 6, read the clipboard 5 days ago, and has never tried to use the camera or record audio. What this means is that these features are optional, and it's perfectly reasonable to disallow them and continue using the app without it even noticing they're missing.

Now, there's an even more important use case: I don't have a whole lot of apps that require permissions for user-hostile reasons (because I avoid installing them in the first place), but there are a few. Fruit Ninja, for instance, wants access to the user's location for no good reason other than evil tracking & advertising purposes. Just now I tested it to see what would happen if I turned off that permission. Guess what? The game still played perfectly fine. There was absolutely no downside for me, the user, in turning the tracking off. Contrary to your assertion, I expect this is what will actually happen in the vast majority of cases (until developers start purposefully sabotaging their apps when the misfeatures fail to work).

"Breaking the app" to me means losing core functionality.

Well in that case, your question presupposes its own answer. -- if it means making the app unusable by definition, then obviously there's no reason not to uninstall it instead.

However, what the OP and I meant by "breaking" was more akin to "breaking a horse."

Twitter recently updated their app to ask my location. Fortunately there is a switch in their app to turn this off, but really I shouldn't have to count on their charity...

More to the point, you shouldn't have to count on their trustworthiness. Who's to say the app doesn't actually leave the location reporting turned on regardless of that setting?

They are giving developers time to update... the only people using this feature are ones who had to specifically go download an app to access it, and who therefore know exactly what they're doing. The only thing this change does is harm the users that had already explicitly accepted the consequences of using the unstable feature by removing their choice.

Here's the fundamental issue: "allowing devs" to decide this sort of thing is user-hostile, because most devs will obviously decide to include every misfeature they think they can possibly get away with.

As a user, I want the app to do what I want it to do and nothing else, and fuck you developer if you don't like it. It's my device and it will stay under my control, not yours, thankyouverymuch.

If you develop software for Android -- or for any other platform, for that matter -- these are the terms you accept. (The only other possibility is to create a fully-DRM'd dystopia, over my dead body.) If you don't like it, go be a plumber instead.