Google makes Roboto font completely open source

For example, anyone who wants to replicate the Android interface in detail for a hobby project can use Google’s Roboto font since Tuesday. The tech giant has made the font completely open source.

Google introduced Roboto in 2011 with Android Ice Cream Sandwich. With the font of designer Christian Robertson, the tech giant tried to refresh the mobile operating system. Since then, it has appeared in several products, including Android and Chrome OS.

Roboto had already appeared under the Apache license, but now Google is making the font completely open source. This means that the toolchain is also completely based on open source software. Google also added support for Latin, Cyrillic and Greek characters in Unicode 7.0. In total, the Roboto font family now includes approximately 40,000 symbols.

For designers and other interested parties, Google has created a GitHub page from which Roboto and additional software can be downloaded. Several teams from Google collaborated on the project, including those from Material Design, Fonts, Android and Internationalization Engineering.