There are totally 18,796 Distinct Android Devices According to the latest Fragmentation Report

The much-maligned Android fragmentation problem has blighted
the mobile operating system for years, though Google has been
steadily taking corrective measures in recent times. The issue? So
many different devices and form-factors, running a multitude of
Android versions which purportedly cause developers no-end of
pain when striving to cater for the increasingly-dominant mobile
platform.
But how serious is the problem? OpenSignal sheds some light on
this today, with its 2014 Android fragmentation report .
OpenSignal on Android
To recap, OpenSignal is the company behind the eponymous app
that creates maps of mobile phone network coverage based on
information crowdsourced from smartphone users. It has been
available on Android for a while already, though it finally launched a
version for iPhone users in 2013.
OpenSignal has emerged as one of the biggest independent sources
of data on the speed and coverage of mobile phone carriers around
the world. Rather than relying on coverage maps provided by
networks themselves, OpenSignal gathers this information directly
from users and opens it to anyone, so they can see for themselves
which ones offer the best coverage where they are. However, a by-
product of this is that OpenSignal garners a lot of additional data
that offers significant insight into the state-of-play across the
mobile realm. This includes things like 4G coverage , and the number
of different device-types. Fragmentation, in other words.
According to OpenSignal's data, it has seen 18,796 'distinct Android
devices' this year, up from 11,868 last year. To garner this data, it
surveyed the last 682,000 devices to install the app, so this should
be fairly representative of the Android ecosystem. But it also
perhaps goes without saying that this number would naturally
increase – after all, a myraid of new Android devices have been
launched in the past 12 months, and the existing devices aren't
going to disappear off the face of the Earth.
It may come as little surprise that Samsung claims dominance in the
Android realm from a brand perspective with 43 percent (down from
47.5 percent last year), while Sony ranked second with a mere 4
percent, which helps illustrate the gulf between Samsung and the
rest. LG, Motorola and Huawei were also among the next most
popular Android handsets. OpenSignal's data reveals 12 of the 13
most common Android devices are Samsung.
Devices are just one facet of the fragmentation fiasco though.
OpenSignal pulls together data from both Google and Apple,
providing a side-by-side glance of the state-of-play. For example,
20.9 percent of Android users are on KitKat (4.4), and most Android
users are on at least Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0), with a little more
than 14 perent persevering with Gingerbread or Froyo.
For comparitivie purposes, according to Apple's own data, iOS 7 sits
at 91 percent, iOS 6 at 8 percent, while a mere 1 percent are still
using an antiquated incarnation of Apple's mobile oeprating system.
It is worth adding here that while OpenSignal's data is fairly
extensive, it is still restricted to devices that have installed the
OpenSignal app – which is a lot, but may not represent the whole
smartphone-using spectrum and thus might not reveal the full
picture.
At any rate, OpenSignal's report makes for an interesting read, and
pulls on additional existing data provided by third-party sources,
including the correlation between fragmentation and GDP per
capita.

- OpenSignal 2014