> I think a better solution is to ... give the application no way of being able to tell if it has permissions or not...
As an Android developer, I strongly disagree with this. Even if I never prompted for permissions, giving me the ability to determine what permissions I have allows me to make certain the application behaves properly with the permissions it does have.
Unfortunately it also allows you to pester the user to change them and, as we've learned, we can't trust applications not to act like they need permissions when they really don't.
Ok, how about a compromise: We'll let the application be able to tell by default, but the user can can choose to lie to it.
"At the same time, your app should respect the user's decision to deny a permission. Starting in Android 11 (API level 30), if the user taps Deny for a specific permission more than once during your app's lifetime of installation on a device, the user doesn't see the system permissions dialog if your app requests that permission again."
As an Android developer, I strongly disagree with this. Even if I never prompted for permissions, giving me the ability to determine what permissions I have allows me to make certain the application behaves properly with the permissions it does have.