Also addressing the point by ergo98 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1744151, a single anecdote does not a convincing argument make. iOS's approval process has a number of explicitly stated goals, one of which is preventing what is happening in this case. So mentioning one app that happened to sneak by the approval process for a short amount of time is meaningless for drawing any real conclusions.
In general, having all the permissions of an app determined at install time seems very flawed to me (whether or not those permissions are optional). Why not ask for permission, when necessary, during the app use, so the user knows exactly what is requiring those permissions? That model is used by desktop apps, and it is the way I would implement it. The up-front permissions model is like sites that ask for your email first before they allow you to read their content- generally scams.