iOS 8 vs San Francisco Font

Question

joandomenech OP

Created May ’17

Replies 3

Boosts 0

Views 1.6k

Participants 4

Hi everyone!

We are working on an app that supports iOS8 to iOS10, and now our UI/UX team want to specify the app's font as San Francisco. But as you know, this font was introduced in iOS9, so my question is :

Can we download San Francisco font from https://developer.apple.com/fonts/and put it in the app project to use it in all iOS versions?
Do we need some approval from Apple?

Thanks!

Boost

Answer 1

KMT OP

May ’17

Read the license w/the SF font download.

You are only allowed to use it for prototyping.

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Answer 2

bingo123 OP

Aug ’17

Did you get a solution ot this. I want to use San Fransisco font for iOS8 - iOS10

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Answer 3

doughill OP

Sep ’20

The solution Apple recommends is to use the System font in your app. You can easily do this by using system font APIs.

See for example UIFont.systemFont(ofSize:)

This allows your application to work correctly on all iOS versions you support. Apple has said that the vertical metrics for the system font won't change, so the text in your app will layout correctly in all cases. You will get San Francisco font on versions of iOS that support it, and will (likely) use Helvetica Neue on older systems. And when your app runs with San Francisco as the system font, there are a lot of real cool typographic effects you get for free (e.g. vertically centered colon). Really, San Francisco is a great application font.

Doug Hill
https://github.com/djfitz/SFFontFeatures

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