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After looking around on the Google Play Store, I've found a lot of apps that 'I like the look of'. But by tapping on them, quite a lot of the time it says "This app is incompatible with your Android version." Is there any way around that?

P.S:I don't have any other Android devices and no, I haven't edited any of the files.

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Did you by any chance modify something in your build.prop file? Like the DPI or device info? – Siebe Nov 6 '12 at 11:05
If you have root on another device (runinng ICS or so) you can pull the same app from there (adb pull /data/app/APPNAME.apk) and subsequently install it on your JB device. You can at least then try to see if it works. – ce4 Nov 6 '12 at 11:39

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The Android Market pulls the OS version directly from the system. As far as I'm aware there's no way to fake this other than building a custom ROM that fakes it, or possibly some sort of code injection.

As ce4's comment says, you'll need to obtain the app from a different device running a supported OS or through some other means (a different app store for example).

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If it is due to the manifest, which most likely bit is, then an error will occur if you try and side load the app.

The only way to install it would be to use a utility such as apktool to edit the manifest file to make it compatible with your device, and then side load it.

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Just to be clear here - doing these things will make the app LOAD, but won't necessarily make it WORK. Don't be shocked if it turns out the app doesn't actually work once you do get it on there. It may be that the developer was just not thinking in how they setup the manifest, but it's possible that they've done something that means the app really won't run, or perhaps the app has serious bugs under your version, so they've locked it out. Either way, just don't be surprised if the app doesn't do so well once you've force it to run on your system. – Michael Kohne Dec 7 '12 at 13:23

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