A brief history of fonts on iOS

Typography has always been important for the Apple ecosystem. It's a big part of what is setting its user interfaces apart from the rest. Fonts or typefaces play an important role.

In 2012 I launched Phoetic. It was my first iOS app; a word cloud generator that could make word clouds in the shape of images and photos. While iOS already provided a small number of great fonts, the selection was a bit limited for creating fancy word clouds. So I added functionality to use different fonts. Of course users started to request the possibility to use other fonts. I added functionality to open downloaded fonts to Phoetic. Then I released a second app, which would also benefit from the ability to use downloaded fonts. The code to handle different fonts was a little bit tricky as there were quite some edge-cases and errors to handle. iOS Frameworks or Packages were not a thing yet, so I copied the code from Phoetic.

Decent developers don't like copying code. I had to fix a number of issues in the font handling for one of the apps and had to do it again for the other. Mighty inconvenient. Since the fonts could not be shared between apps, users also had to download the fonts twice and they took up twice the amount of space necessary. Font files usually are not that big. Still, it didn't feel right. If only you could install fonts on iOS.

After some research it turned out you could install fonts on iOS, but it was a device management feature. I guess the intended use case was that a large company would like to use iPhones and iPads and use their custom branded fonts in documents and presentations. In order to make this work you need to create a configuration profile containing the fonts and install it on your iPhone or iPad. And a configuration profile could only be installed via Safari or the standard Mail app. Not very convenient, but workable. And thus, I created Fonteer in 2016. Fonteer is a utility app that allows you to install collections of fonts on your iPhone and iPad, using configuration profiles.

Fast forward to 2019. Apple released iOS 13 with the ability to install fonts (finally). At first I thought Fonteer had been sherlocked (a term app developers use when Apple implements features from their apps in iOS, making their apps obsolete). But Apple made the decision to only allow fonts that passed their App Store review! This is a bit problematic. Font designers are not app developers. You cannot expect an independent font designer to create and release an app and go through the App Store review process just to make a font available in iOS. The result is that most free fonts will not be available on iOS. On MacOS you can just download a font from anywhere and install it via FontBook. On iOS you'll have to find an app that installs the specific font you are looking for. What's worse, if you search for 'fonts' on the App Store, you mostly find apps that install keyboards to type fancy unicode characters. These are apps that do NOT install fonts and have NOTHING to do with fonts!

In 2023, the situation with fonts on iOS is still not ideal. The only positive thing, for me, is that Fonteer hasn't been sherlocked and is still as relevant today as it was at its initial release. After 7 years, Fonteer needed a big redesign to stay up-to-date. That's why I have released a completely new app that is now also supported on macOS, making it even easier to use the same fonts on all your devices!