That's really something the OS should be able to do. It ought to be able to examine the dependencies of the app and throw up a helpful alert if they're not met.

Of course, since the common case is newer apps on older OSes, that requires thinking ahead before such a problem actually happens, and that's tough. Even if you implement it, it's hard to get right because it's hard to really test. Apple does this, but the facility was broken in several Mac OS X releases, making it far less useful than it should have been.