I'd like to see what percentage of app sales come from Gingerbread. My guess is that people that are willing to buy apps are not* using a 3 year old phone. (*edited)

A gingerbread phone can by of any age. That's why google is moving towards a new contract for its gapps. Going forward you can only release the current Android or go as far as 2 versions back. So we're on 4.4 now, thus making 4.2 the oldest version for a phone released today (assuming the new contracts are in place).

A few manufacturers went a bit overboard mass producing GB-only phones lately because of how cheap their components are. I'm not sure what this means for the budget phone market now that they need to be 4.2 or higher on release date. From what I've seen, the new budget phone is the low-end Nokia Windows Phone with carriers like Cricket literally giving them away with rebates or charging next to nothing for them like $50, and that's on a no contract plan!

Getting Android out of the GB-era budget ghetto is a good thing. If the Moto E can handle 4.4 then so can everyone else. Supposedly 4.4 uses less ram than previous versions of the 4.x line. The head of google claimed that it can run on 512mb devices. They really, really want to kill GB. I imagine there will always be a android budget phone out there, just not no name junk running a near 4 year old OS.

The real question is how many more GB phones are there in the supply chain that will be sold this year and next? Millions? How long will these things be in play? It really does look like there is a real abandoned version of Android that can't survive fragmentation now. Many apps simply will not work. Shame really because I'm sure no one explained to the budget phone buyers that they were buying an ancient OS that can't be upgraded on that system with so little ram.