It's amazing to me that we're saying that a three year old OS is too old to have software written for it. Especially given that a part of the laptop market has metamorphosed into the tablet market.
I guess that's not a problem if you buy new tablets/phones every year, which is what we're moving towards.
Most people buy apps when their device is new-ish. Three year old phones are fine. Five year old phones are fine. But you are not going to sell the users of these devices an app that you started writing today. And you won't lose customers if you stop upgrading them, either.
> Android 4.0+ is just much more mature than 2.3 in terms of UI and API.
Maturity is a very important point. Between 2.3 and 4.0, Android became scale-able across tablets and handsets, with unified APIs enabling a unified code-base.
Compared to that big change, dealing with API differences from Android 4.0 to 4.4 is a relatively small matter, comparable to testing for hardware capabilities (and often tied to hardware capabilities). You can test for the API version on the fly and keep a unified code base.
I guess that's not a problem if you buy new tablets/phones every year, which is what we're moving towards.