This gives all the control back to the user. Nobody should be bullied into just accepting all permissions the developer wants. The developer should be forced to gracefully degrade their UX when their dependencies are denied without preventing access to the core service and should be sued into oblivion when they violate this basic promise under accessibility laws.

From a developer perspective virtualization would also make accomplishing this much easier since they no longer have to be limited to crappy APIs that are not just sometimes vulnerable and incompatible but restricted on purpose under bogus pretense.

If the user can't determine what an app does with the resources it wants it should be trivial for the OS to mock the resources, see what happens, and report it back to the user. i.e. when enabling networking the app attempts to phone home somewhere shady, when enabling file system access it attempts to read/write outside its own directories, etc. I am pretty sure this would not scare off users, but make them curious.

For me it is just a terrible feeling to not really own a device I bought, so I avoid them wherever I can. Annoyingly, this is getting increasingly more difficult.

As a potentially interesting aside, today lack of programmability seems to be a sign of a maturing market. I recently researched e-cigarettes that I can program to time me, those that have a computer in them basically all allow for writing your own programs. Same with the smart watch market, although Apple is trying its best to ruin that as well.

Then it auto-deletes and there's nothing you can do about it.

The only class of malware that the currently-mandated friction is preventing is the kind that appears benevolent for 7 days then strikes on day 8.

That level of friction is $99 :/