Instead of this madness device manufacturers could work together with HTML5 cons... to make a set of APIs that access native things, and for not-so-standardized features they could use prefixes kinda like we did in CSS. The websites accessing these HTML5 APIs would simply check for their existence first, then start using them. Usage of the APIs would then kick of device specific permission prompts, etc... Think about the integrations too, we would no longer have to set up application forwarding URLs like twitter:// to route to our app, everything would work from any device!

Even if manufacturers don't work together, if they at least provided JS API access built into their native browsers - then we can build shims on top of them.