Typography is pretty awful on Android in general. Both Roboto and Droid Sans are nightmare Frankenfonts.
Font rendering on Android is bulky, blocky, and fails to consider how humans read letterforms. So, even if a designer can convince the team to license a better font, it’ll end up a smeared mess on users’ screens.
The API calls to layout type on Android suck. (iOS sucks slightly less depending on how willing your UI engineer is willing to devote to this most basic foundation of design.)
“U MAD, BRO?”
Yeah. I get paid to be a picky snob about what the user sees and how they feel about the product. It pisses me off to look at Android because its not disappointing, the way Win8 is, but actively anti-design. Why pay to license good fonts? Why make a system for rendering type nicely? Because this stuff is basic user experience. It's like going into a hotel and discovering that the paint is yellowing. That hotel is more likely to have dirty towels, no hot water, smelly sheets, and bed bugs.
> Typography is pretty awful on Android in general. Both Roboto and Droid Sans are nightmare Frankenfonts.
I like Roboto, but what do you find to be bad about those fonts?
> Font rendering on Android is bulky, blocky, and fails to consider how humans read letterforms. So, even if a designer can convince the team to license a better font, it’ll end up a smeared mess on users’ screens.
This isn't really true when setting custom typefaces on various views. Just subclass them and set up the typeface in the constructor and you are done. You just end up using that subclass your in layouts instead of a standard TextView.
> It pisses me off to look at Android because its not disappointing, the way Win8 is, but actively anti-design.
I'm not really sure what you mean w.r.t to text. The text views and code cover most use cases and offer ways to handle flowing text in some cases, but you can always fall back to WebView rendering text content (which is easier for writers or editors to handle when making the text content).
Isn't it only a problem for fonts without subpixel hinting? I've used a fair amount of custom fonts, most render perfectly fine, and looking at well-designed apps I never felt like it's an issue.
I didn't even understand what he meant by device specific, personally. Every app I've ever seen that uses a custom font just includes it in the app and it works on every device. I suppose I've seen OTF fonts not work on very old Android versions, like 1.6 and lower or something, but I've never seen a TTF not work.
