[untog]

That's exactly the reason, and it's more legitimate than you give it credit for. I can foresee numerous situations where users disable location tracking (in the name of saving battery) without realising the effect it will have (rendering a location-based app useless).

A nice middle ground would be to keep App Ops, but hidden away somewhere, much like the Developer Tools are.

[pessimizer]

>users disable location tracking (in the name of saving battery) without realising the effect it will have (rendering a location-based app useless).

If you can assume that location data would be available, you can also assume that users will be sentient.

[Karunamon]

And random developers start getting one-star "Doesn't work!" reviews because our "sentient" user forgot to change their settings.

[jessriedel]

This is easy to fix. Just have the app notify the user that feature X will break without permission Y. The user can then make the decision.