Could you detail the "etc"? To my knowledge historically the only activity that triggered a permission confirmation was a precise location fix. Later, after a debacle with many apps siphoning and scurrilously offloading contact lists, contact access was added as a confirmation.

Android has very granular permissions, and iOS does not. If you don't like the requests of an app, the general option is not to install it. Such is exactly what I've done with a number of small vendor apps -- if you demand anything that you don't need, I don't install.

Of course on the flip side Android, be design, allows for much tighter integration and leveraging between apps and the OS, so there are more interesting opportunities, both for good and bad. But those, too, are covered under permissions.