Google’s Android Fonts

I love Android, and I love that Google is offering such a good mobile operating system, for free. Many people might just remember that Microsoft grew to prominence in the IT industry in much a similar way. They provided DOS for free (or at least at a low cost) to OEMs, which provided them with much of the market share that they have now.

It can be seen as actually quite smart that Google are offering their OS for such a low price.

Google commissioned Ascender, a digital typeface foundry and software development company located in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, Illinois in the United States to create the fonts that are used by the Android user interface.

Ascender engineered the new set of system User Interface (UI) fonts named “Droid” for the Android platform built by the Open Handset Alliance. The fonts provided by Ascender allow highly legible text resulting in easy to use interfaces.

The fonts are open source, licensed under the Apache Software License.

Finding a download link to the fonts can be a bit tricky, but one of the easiest ways to get the fonts is to download them from Google’s Web Fonts project.

Here is Droid Sans, Droid Sans Mono and Droid Serif.

Failing that there is this link here to a Mercurial repository, but I didn’t tell you that, now did I?

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