> But because Android has more phones in the marketplace than iOS is it possibly now for developers to make Android 4.0 the minimum and still get a respected number of users?

There's no easy answer to that question because it depends on what your target use case actually is.

Remember that the goal of Android is to be a universal platform for hardware, which means that the target devices for Android are much more heterogeneous than iOS - and therefore the intended use case as well.

I use an out-of-date Android device as a portable music player and an up-to-date one as my regular phone. Even that's not that wildly different if you start imagining people running Android on their household appliances.

So, in my case, even though I technically still run Gingerbread, I'm fine with Android applications requiring 4.2+, since the only device that runs Gingerbread is essentially a single-purpose dedicated device. I imagine we'll start to see more of this behavior in the future.