According to
9-to-5 Mac:
Font management is getting a major upgrade on iOS 13. It will not be necessary to install a profile to get new fonts into the system anymore. Instead there will be a new font management panel in Settings. A new standard font picker component will be available for developers and the system will notify the user when they open a document that has missing fonts.
It's about time. I say this as both an iPhone and (especially) iPad user and as a font maker. There have been ways to do it, but nothing officially supported or that normal users would put up with.
Comments
The other big one, if Apple wants iPads to be taken seriously as an alternative to laptops, is to open up the file system to external storage. Cloud storage is great, but has some serious shortcomings.
(FWIW, my desktop license is based on number of users anyway, not computers or devices.)
IF you could install fonts on the device, it would be a separate question whether the OS would allow users to change the system font settings.
But currently, there is no general way to install fonts on an iOS device. Period.
It's possible to do this now using third party apps, such as AnyFont, which take advantage of a capability intended mainly for developers known as provisioning where you install a "profile" on an iOS device. It works for fonts, but is not straightforward or simple to do.
Apple promotes the use of Pages and Keynote on iOS. Currently, whenever you opened a Keynote document in iOS which was created on the Mac, Keynote on iOS will force-replace all fonts in the document to Helvetica Neue – unless you’re using one of the system fonts.
For companies using their custom designed font, or the font chosen with their identity design (Philips, Renault, Volkswagen, Coca-Cola, to name a few), this is a game changer.
Plus, graphic designers will no longer be forced by management to go with a system font or a free-use licensed font when they’re developing an identity design for a brand.
Yes, Superclarendon and Marion as well. I think having them included in a system which didn't allow font installations was like a captive audience which I'm sure helped me sell a few more licenses. Superclarendon was barely in my top 50* before iOS inclusion and now it's always in the top 10. Marion had been plummeting before it was included in iOS/MacOS and now it's in the top 20, sometimes top 10. I assume some of those sales were from projects that perhaps started on an iOS/MacOS and moved to Windows, Linux or Android.
* Out of about 600.
I think so, yes. "Desktop" licensing is soon to be obsolete, I think.
Adobe's "5 devices per license" seems smarter all the time. But Mark's choice to license to users, not devices -- that might be the smartest.
--Matthew
I don't think there is any perfect solution. I think basing it on users is easier to understand from the purchaser's point of view.
The per-CPU idea goes back to the days when Adobe had copy protection on fonts. It could track installations onto CPUs so that's what the license was based on.