Any programmer worth their salt should, whenever doing any sort of IO (regardless of hardware, cloud, or otherwise) should be making sure they get a sane result/object back. Purely anecdotal here, but I run XPrivacy and have the vast majority of my apps blocked from location. You'd think my phone would barely work, but it actually works fine. I don't think I've ever had an application crash from lack of GPS.

Part of why they don't crash is the multi-threaded nature of how the location API works in Android. High level: you basically of instantiate the location object at the start of your thread, and give it a call back function to call once it has a location for you. You don't know when/if you will ever get a callback, so you have to put some checks in.