The latest version of Adobe Cordova was released today (v. 3.5) and perusing through the release notes, I saw that they had dropped support for iOS 5, leaving only one major previous release (iOS 6) and the current release. In the past, Android developers have been plagued by the slow release of new versions of the Android SDK to existing Android phones. It has only been in the past year or so that a significant number of developers have moved off supporting 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) and below, making the lowest 
version number supported being 4.0.3. The question for Android developers is: how aggressively can they move off of 4.0.3 to the next major release, 4.1?
Taking a quick check of the Android smartphones available through the various carriers, none of the phones are lower than 4.1 but a number are at 4.1 (example, the LG Enact and Motorola Droid RAZR M) so, unlike Apple, we as developers cannot move back to only 4.2 and eliminate phones that are still being sold by the major carriers. In all likelihood, the 4.0.3 phones are those who are waiting for their 2-year contract to come up, knowing that the phone will be not be updated by the carrier or OEM. Dropping 2.3.3 loses a developer about 16% of the market but gains in terms of lower bug count (quite a few issues are performance related, trying to use a modern mobile app on older hardware) and a wider selection of third-party tools (which have abandoned 2.3.3 and many are 4.1 and above).
The key issue is supporting 4.0.3 and its 13.4% share. The developer has to determine how resource-intensive the app is and what is the risk of users trying to run it on 4.0.3 (which are also resource-limited) and the subsequent crashes due to memory errors. It is difficult to justify to management a proposal that shuts out almost 30% (2.3.3’s 16.2% and 4.0.3’s 13.4%) of a customer base but the bigger question is: does it make business sense to support a project when the funds required exceeds the return of investment and the risk of poor acceptance in the marketplace when the app’s performance requirements exceeds the user’s hardware at the low end of the curve?
One other consideration I failed to mention is usage by the international market. If the mobile app is targeted outside of the United States/Canada, many lower-end Android phones (white-box, introductory) sold in India, China and Africa are still using 2.3.3/Gingerbread. In the case of tablets, even the low-end 8 GB/under a $100.00 models are supporting Android 4.1 and above (source: Walmart.com).
