Question

I’ve been reading the App Store Review Guidelines (including linked websites in) trying to find if there are some restrictions about the fonts that are used in the app. I’m doing an app which needs to look modern and the typography is a very important thing to make look it. I haven’t found any related topics on the official documentation, but i’m not sure they will pass the review. Right now i’m using Roboto font (from Android, yes) because it looks very great but the fact that it’s an Android font could bring problems on the approving process. Does anyone had this situation or knows what happened in that case? Is there any restriction about the typography used in the apps? So many thanks!

Answer 1

As long as you have a license (“the rights”) to use the font as you are, Apple doesn’t care.

App Store Review Guidelines 8.5:

Apps may not use protected third party material such as trademarks, copyrights, patents or violate 3rd party terms of use. Authorization to use such material must be provided upon request.

The license for Roboto is the Apache 2 license, available at http://www.fontsquirrel.com/license/roboto

The main thing to do is not strictly for app store approval (though it may help with human interface guidelines compliance) but for unifying aesthetics. Make sure that there really is a need to use a custom font. iOS includes quite a few fonts: http://iosfonts.com and whenever possible it’s always good to use the built in components.