My initial thoughts on Google offering a hosted version of Droid:
This is more an extension of their mobile play than getting into the font hosting.
- Here’s why:
- The Android handsets only display the Droid family of fonts.
- Google’s stated a number of times they’re serious about being successful in mobile.
- Google is a web app company – not a native-software-on-the-device company (i.e. Apple, Microsoft).
- By offering a hosted version of Droid – they’ve made it much easier for their internal teams to simulate what their web apps (i.e. Google Docs, Calendar, etc) will look like on Android devices w/o needing to actually use a phone.
Of course, I reserve the right to change my position when I see Google hosting something other than Droid.
- Some relevant articles I’ve written on how I interpret Google’s product strategy:
- Users are Side Effects
- The Difference Between Yahoo and Google
Update – I’m now changing my position
This guide explains how to use the Google Font API to add web fonts to your pages. As I mentioned on the Kernest blog – this is a huge win for openly licensed fonts.