There many people with dyslexia and other stuff like that and using some other font like comic sans can make a huge difference on them, yet there is no way to easily (I think) change the font on our devices. We should be able to just download and load the font. What do you think?
The way smartphones have evolved has been awful.
When they first started gaining traction, I thought that over time, as the hardware improved, we’d increasingly see devices that were essentially mini PCs, with all of the freedoms that come with it. That as hardware became more capable, PC and smartphone software stacks would converge.
I yearn for proper Linux phones. Plenty of gnome apps are already ready in terms of UX (try shrinking them down to a smartphone screen size, they’ll seamlessly switch to a smartphone UI, it’s pretty incredible). Maybe one day.
Should we be able to? Absofuckinglutely.
Unfortunately, it’s another casualty of the looks of the device OS being part of the brand. Essentially: if you chose a font that countered the brand look Google (or even more so Apple) is striving to maintain, you would decrease the value of their brand. So they don’t let you. Remember the first iPhones? You couldn’t set a wallpaper. The background was black. Period. It would have been perfectly possible to allow a user to set a wallpaper. But when the wallpaper was black, anyone seeing the iPhone’s home screen could immediately recognize it as an iPhone. It took four fucking iPhone generations until you could change the wallpaper. Not being able to change the font is that concept, but on not quite as many steroids.
Is it stupid? Absolutely. Unfortunately, it’s probably not going to change any time soon, because it seems this branding works for those companies, users be damned.
God, I hope Linux phones get more usable, and fast.
You think that’s bad?
Just wait. Soon there will be a lot of other things you want but won’t be able to do anymore.
Oh, I’m aware of that too :(
In most oem roms it’s an option, but in other aspects they tend to be worse than google’s walled garden even. From what I can remember Samsung and Oppo/Oneplus/Vivo/Realme have ability to change fonts but I wouldn’t put my trust and money in any of them
You can indeed change fonts on Samsung but you have like 4 different default options and then you have to download them from galaxy store. Many of them are not free (they are also crap) and you definitely can’t import one on your own.
I’ve definitely imported a custom font on my Note 20 in the past. Whether that feature is still alive in the most recent One UI versions I’m not sure I suppose, but it was possible, just incredibly backwards and convoluted. If I recall, I had to download a font file and then put it into a very specific folder for the UI to recognize it
You can also use an app that does it but, again, it shouldn’t be that tedious and it should have been available to all android devices
From what I gathered just now you can install any flipfont font from google play/aurora store, most of them are useless though
