Google has a big change in store for ChromeOS users: a new default font for the operating system, which will replace Roboto as the go-to typeface on all Chrome devices.
The new default font is Google Sans (formerly known as Product Sans), which owners of the best Chromebooks will already be familiar with, even unknowingly; it’s already seeded throughout both the OS and Google’s websites, appearing in the Files app and Quick Settings menu as well as on Google’s own digital storefront.
If font changes are something that worries you (yes, they worry me; yes, I’m a big software interface nerd), then thankfully there’s no need to panic here: Google Sans is a pretty inoffensive font, a far cry from that other Sans font that virtually everyone hates. In fact, it’s very similar to the existing default Roboto, or fonts like San Francisco and Open Sans, to the point where an unaware user might not even notice the change.
Chrome, sans Roboto
Changing the primary font of an entire operating system is no small feat – there was uproar among font fanatics when Microsoft changed the default font of Word from Calibri to Aptos after a 17-year run. I’m personally quite averse to change, and while I approved of the shift away from Times New Roman (ugh) back in the day, I felt that the Calibri-to-Aptos move was unnecessary. After all, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?
Well, Roboto ain’t broke, but I can appreciate why Google wants to make the change to its own branded typography. Google Sans is a good font; after all, it’s the lettering that the search engine giant has chosen to represent itself with on official public material, so I can reasonably assume there has been a lot of money and many, many hours of work poured into ensuring its perfection. It’s a pleasingly modern typeface, most crucially opting for an open-tail lower-case ‘g’ – none of that hideous loop-tail business here, thank you very much. Yes, I know we use it here on TechRadar, and that you’re looking at it right now. No, I’m not happy about it, but you’ve got to pick your battles.
Product Sans, now Google Sans, was originally introduced in 2015 for Google’s branding and marketing materials (Image credit: Google, Kashmiri)
Considering that Google Sans is already present in many corners of ChromeOS, it’s not likely to be a world-shaking change for most users. My fellow font fiends can relax, though – this isn’t even a big leap for those who pay close attention to lettering, if you ask me.
Roboto won’t be completely ousted from the OS just yet, either – judging by a Chromium Gerrit code commit spotted by 9to5Google, the former default font will stick around for times when Google Sans just won’t quite fit (due to a lack of specific glyph support, for example). We don’t have a concrete date for when the change will be implemented just yet; given that ChromeOS version 124 is already in beta and due to go live imminently, it’ll likely be in version 125 towards the end of May or the beginning of June.
Got a strong opinion about fonts? I know some of you do. Hit me up on X (cough, Twitter, cough) with your absolute worst font takes!
Google is paying Apple a lot to be Safari’s default search engine. Photo: Rajesh Pandey/Cult of Mac
Google paid Apple $20 billion for Google to remain the default search engine across all Apple devices. This figure came to light through court documents submitted in the US Justice Department’s lawsuit against Google.
During the course of the hearing, Google and Apple tried their best not to reveal the amount publicly.
Apple prefers Google because it is the best
An October 2023 report also estimated Apple receiving $18-$20 billion from Google in 2022. This time around, the documents reveal the exact figure of $20 billion, coming directly from Apple’s SVP of services, Eddy Cue.
The Bloomberg report details that during last fall’s trial, Apple said Google paid them “billions” to be the default search engine. A Google witness later accidentally testified that the company pays Apple 36% of the revenue from search ads.
While it is vital for Google to remain the default search engine on iPhone and Mac, the money also plays a big role in Apple’s bottom line. As per the document, Google’s payment accounted for 17.5% of Apple’s revenue.
However, as Eddy Cue testified during the hearing, Apple prefers Google not because of the billions of dollars it receives but because it is “the best.”
During the trial last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that it was offering Apple multiple concessions to move away from Google. These include sharing 90% of the advertising revenue and hiding the Bing logo in Safari on iPhone. The switch would have been “game changing,” which is why Microsoft was willing to make these concessions.
Google’s deal with Apple could put it into trouble
Given the iPhone’s popularity in the US, it’s crucial for Google to remain the default search engine on the devices. This also explains why Google paid Apple more than $1.5 billion monthly in 2022. But this move will now probably get the company into trouble.
If the US Justice Department wins its lawsuit against Google’s alleged monopoly in search and advertising, the latter might have to cancel its deal with Apple.
Google and the Justice Department will submit their closing arguments on Thursday and Friday. The court’s final decision will arrive later this year.
Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to be the default search engine for Safari on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, reports Bloomberg. The information was revealed in court documents Google provided in its antitrust dispute with the United States Department of Justice.
The DoJ has accused Google of having a monopoly on search, and in the lawsuit against Google, the search engine deal with Apple has been a major focus. In November, lawsuit documents indicated that Google was paying 36 percent of the total revenue that it earns from searches conducted on Safari, and now it turns out that equates to $20 billion.
Google has been the default search engine on Apple devices since 2002, though the deal has been renegotiated several times. Apple and Google have worked to keep the terms of the search engine agreement under wraps during the trial and before, but it has been well known that Google is paying Apple billions per year.
Last October, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that the agreement between Apple and Google has made it impossible for search engines like Bing to compete. Microsoft at one point wanted Apple to buy Bing, but Apple was not interested. Microsoft blamed Google, but Apple’s Eddy Cue said that Aplple was concerned that Bing could not compete in “quality and capabilities.” Cue claimed that Apple uses Google as the iPhone’s default search engine because Apple has “always thought it was the best.”
Google is the default search engine on Apple devices in most countries, but users can opt to swap to Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia as alternatives. Changing browser engines requires opening up the Safari settings.
In Europe, the Digital Markets Act has required Apple to make changes to how browsers work. Users are able to choose a default browser when setting up their iPhone, and there are more options than the handful of providers that Apple allows in the United States.
If Google loses the antitrust lawsuit against it, the deal between Apple and Google could be dissolved. Closing arguments are expected on Thursday and Friday, with the judge’s ruling set to come later in 2024.
In 2014, WIRED asked me to write a few lines about my most-used app as part of an internship application. I wrote about WhatsApp because it was a no-brainer. I was an international student from India, and it was my lifeline to my family and to my girlfriend, now my wife, who lived on the other side of the world. “This cross-platform messenger gets all the credit for my long-distance relationship of two years, which is still going strong,” I wrote in my application. “Skype is great, Google+ Hangouts are the best thing to have happened since Gmail but nothing says ‘I love you’ like a WhatsApp text message.”
A few months into that internship, Facebook announced it was buying WhatsApp for a staggering $19 billion. In WIRED’s newsroom, there were audible gasps at this seemingly minor player’s price tag. American journalists weren’t exactly unfamiliar with WhatsApp. But much of the country was still locked in a battle between green and blue bubbles, even as the rest of the world had switched to an app created by two former Yahoo! engineers in WIRED’s Mountain View backyard.
Text messaging was one of the few things you could do on WhatsApp in 2014. There were no emoji you could react with, no high-definition videos you could send, no GIFs or stickers, no read receipts until the end of that year and certainly no voice or video calling. And yet, more than 500 million people around the world were hooked, reveling in the freedom of using nascent cellular data to swap unlimited messages with friends and family instead of paying mobile carriers per text.
WhatsApp’s founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, launched the app in 2009 simply to display status messages next to people’s names in a phone’s contact book. But after Apple introduced push notifications on the iPhone later that year, it evolved into a full-blown messaging service. Now, 15 years later, WhatsApp has become a lot more — an integral part of the propaganda machinery of political parties in India and Brazil, a way for millions of businesses to reach customers, a way to send money to people and merchants, a distribution platform for publications, brands and influencers, a video conferencing system and a private social network for older adults. And it is still a great way for long-distance lovers to stay connected.
“WhatsApp is kind of like a media platform and kind of like a messaging platform, but it’s also not quite those things,” Surya Mattu, a researcher at Princeton who runs the university’s Digital Witness Lab, which studies how information flows through WhatsApp, told Engadget. “It has the scale of a social media platform, but it doesn’t have the traditional problems of one because there are no recommendations and no social graph.”
Indeed, WhatsApp’s scale dwarfs nearly every social network and messaging app out there. In 2020, WhatsApp announced it had more than two billion users around the world. It’s bigger than iMessage (1.3 billion users), TikTok (1 billion), Telegram (800 million), Snap (400 million) and Signal (40 million.) It stands head and shoulders above fellow Meta platform Instagram, which captures around 1.4 billion users. The only thing bigger than WhatsApp is Facebook itself, with more than three billion users .
WhatsApp has become the world’s default communications platform. Ten years after it was acquired, its growth shows no sign of stopping. Even in the US, it is finally beginning to break through the green and blue bubble battles and is reportedly one of Meta’s fastest-growing services. As Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the New York Times last year, WhatsApp is the “next chapter” for the company.
Will Cathcart, a longtime Meta executive, who took over WhatsApp in 2019 after its original founders departed the company, credits WhatsApp’s early global growth to it being free (or nearly free — at one point, WhatsApp charged people $1 a year), running on almost any phone, including the world’s millions of low-end Android devices, reliably delivering messages even in large swathes of the planet with suboptimal network conditions and, most importantly, being dead simple, free of the bells and whistles that bloat most other messaging apps. In 2013, a year before Facebook acquired it, WhatsApp added the ability to send short audio messages.
“That was really powerful,” Cathcart told Engadget, “People who don’t have high rates of literacy or someone new to the internet could spin up WhatsApp, use it for the first time and understand it.”
In 2016, WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption, something Cathcart said was a huge selling point. The feature made WhatsApp a black box, hiding the contents of messages from everyone — even WhatsApp — except the sender and the receiver. The same year, WhatsApp announced that one billion people were using the service every month.
That explosive growth came with a huge flip side: As hundreds of millions of people in heavily populated regions, like Brazil and India, came online for the first time, thanks to inexpensive smartphone and data prices, WhatsApp became a conduit for hoaxes and misinformation to flow freely. In India, currently WhatsApp’s largest market with more than 700 million users, the app overflowed with propaganda and disinformation against opposition political parties, cheerleading Narendra Modi, the country’s nationalist Prime Minister accused of destroying its secular fabric.
Then people started dying. In 2017 and 2018, frenzied mobs in remote parts of the country high on baseless rumors about child abductors forwarded through WhatsApp, lynched nearly two dozen people in 13 separate incidents. In response to the crisis, WhatsApp swung into action. Among other things, it made significant product changes, such as clearly labeling forwarded messages — the primary way misformation spread across the service — as well as severely restricting the number of people and groups users could forward content to at the same time.
In Brazil, the app is widely seen as a key tool in the country’s former President Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 win. Bolsonaro, a far-right strongman, was accused of getting his supporters to circumvent WhatsApp’s spam controls to run elaborate misinformation campaigns, blasting thousands of WhatsApp messages attacking his opponent, Fernando Haddad.
Since these incidents, WhatsApp has established fact-checking partnerships with more than 50 fact-checking organizations globally (because WhatsApp is encrypted, fact-checkers depend on users reporting messages to their WhatsApp hotlines and respond with fact checks). It also made additional product changes, like letting users quickly Google a forwarded message to fact-check it within the app. “Over time, there might be more things we can do,” said Cathcart, including potentially using AI to help with WhatsApp’s fact-checking. “There’s a bunch of interesting things we could do there, I don’t think we’re done,” he said.
Recently, WhatsApp has rapidly added new features, such as the ability to share large files, messages that auto-destruct after they’re viewed, Instagram-like Stories (called Statuses) and larger group calls, among other things. But a brand new feature rolled out globally in fall 2023 called Channels points to WhatsApp’s ambitions to become more than a messaging app. WhatsApp described Channels, in a blog post announcing the launch, as “a one-way broadcast tool for admins to send text, photos, videos, stickers and polls.” They’re a bit like a Twitter feed from brands, publishers and people you choose to follow. It has a dedicated tab in WhatsApp, although interaction with content is limited to responding with emoji — no replies. There are currently thousands of Channels on WhatsApp and 250-plus have more than a million followers each, WhatsApp told Engadget. They include Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (18.9 million followers), Narendra Modi (13.8 million followers), FC Barcelona (27.7 million followers) and the WWE (10.9 million followers). And even though it’s early days, Channels is fast becoming a way for publishers to distribute their content and build an audience.
“It took a year for us to grow to an audience of 35,000 on Telegram,” Rachel Banning-Lover, the head of social media and development at the Financial Times (155,000 followers) toldNieman Lab in November. “Comparatively, we [grew] a similar-sized following [on WhatsApp] in two weeks.”
WhatsApp’s success at consistently adding new functionality without succumbing to feature sprawl has allowed it to thrive, both with its core audience and also, more recently, with users in the US. According to data that analytics firm Data.ai shared with Engadget, WhatsApp had nearly 83 million users in the US in January 2024, compared to 80 million a year before. A couple of years ago, WhatsApp ran an advertising campaign in the US — its first in the country — where billboards and TV spots touted the app’s focus on privacy.
It’s a sentiment shared by Zuckerberg himself, who, in 2021, shared a “privacy-focused vision for social networking” on his Facebook page. “I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident that what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around,” he wrote. “This is the future I hope we will help bring about.”
Meta has now begun using WhatsApp’s sheer scale to generate revenue, although it’s unclear so far how much money, if any, the app makes. “The business model we’re really excited about and one that we’ve been growing for a couple of years successfully is helping people talk to businesses on WhatsApp,” Cathcart said. “That’s a great experience.” Meta monetizes WhatsApp by charging large businesses to integrate the platform directly into existing systems they use to manage interactions with customers. And it integrates the whole system with Facebook, allowing businesses to place ads on Facebook that, when clicked, open directly to a WhatsApp chat with the business. These have become the fastest-growing ad format across Meta, the company told The New York Times.
A few years ago, a configuration change in Facebook’s internal network knocked multiple Facebook services, including WhatsApp, off the internet for more than six hours and ground the world to a halt.
“It’s like the equivalent of your phone and the phones of all of your loved ones being turned off without warning. [WhatsApp] essentially functions as an unregulated utility,” journalist Aura Bogado reportedly wrote on X (then Twitter). In New Delhi and Brazil, gig workers were unable to reach customers and lost out on wages. In London, crypto trades stopped as traders were unable to communicate with clients. One firm claimed a drop of 15 percent. In Russia, oil markets were hit after traders were unable to get in touch with buyers in Europe and Asia placing orders.
Fifteen years after it was created, the messaging app now runs the world.
To celebrate Engadget’s 20th anniversary, we’re taking a look back at the products and services that have changed the industry since March 2, 2004.
WhatsApp compresses all the images and videos unless you share them as documents. And many people get annoyed by the drop in quality of images and videos shared through WhatsApp. Last year, the app introduced the ability to share HD (actually 4K resolution) quality media, but you have to explicitly select that option. If you are tired of selecting the HD option every time, you might be in for a treat.
WhatsApp to bring the ability to select HD quality as the default resolution setting for sending images and videos
The Meta-owned company is working on a feature that lets you choose the default image and video quality for all your messages. WABetaInfo has found that WhatsApp is testing an option in the app’s Storage And Data settings that lets you choose between ‘Standard’ and ‘HD’ quality for all the images and videos that you share. This feature has been found in the 2.24.5.6 version of WhatsApp for Android.
After thorough testing is done, WhatsApp could release this feature to all Android users. You can expect to see this option on your Galaxy (or any other Android) device in the coming months.
Right now, when you share images and videos, you have to select the HD option every single time if you want to share higher-quality media. Many normal users don’t even know that this option exists, so many images and videos aren’t even shared in HD quality by default. Once this feature is released the usage of HD quality might increase and it will make it easier to send higher-quality media for those who want to use it.
Change is hard – and for font nerds, it can be downright painful. They really feel the difference between Arial and Helvetica, and they know that Comic Sans is an embarrassment, and that Papyrus might be pure evil.
I’m not necessarily one of those people, but I don’t appreciate change – especially in fonts.
Last year, Microsoft announced that it was changing its Microsoft Word default font from Calibri to a new sans-serif font known as Aptos. Calibri had a nearly 20-year run. It succeeded Times New Roman, a serif font that has served as the default font since the word processing application’s inception (the dictionary defines a serif as “a slight projection finishing off a stroke of a letter in certain typefaces”).
When Word launched in 1983, I’d argue that some were still writing on typewriters (most likely IBM Selectrics with those typeballs) that were probably still using the classic serif font.
Modernity, though, required the shaving of those serifs for a cleaner look – at least I assume this was Microsoft‘s thinking when it switched to Calibri. I never liked the font; it was dull, and not even as interesting as Helvetica, or my favorite, Helvetica Narrow.
I got used to it, but only because, as the default font, it was what I automatically saw and typed in every time I used Microsoft Word. Some say “familiarity breeds contempt,” but in truth it just breeds familiarity. You can, by the way, easily customize Word’s default font. From the Format tab, you select Font. Choose the font and font size you like, and then select Default and click OK. If your Word is still stuck on Calbri (or, god forbid, Abadi MT), you can quickly switch to the font and style that turns you on.
Even so, when I read that Microsoft was switching up the default font I was a little worried. What if Word went back to a serif style or chose something more ornate? What if, heaven forbid, Microsoft chose a font that looked like Comic Sans?
Comparing the old default Word font with the new one (Image credit: Future)
Aptos, though, is none of those things. It manages to be clean and clear, but with just a little style.
Instead of a thin, straight, vertical line for a lowercase ‘L’, Aptos’s l takes a tiny curve just before the stem reaches the baseline. Letters like ‘z’ are a little wider. The ear of the ‘g’ – that small stroke that projects from the top of the letter – starts thin and gets a bit thicker while also gently arching up. ‘S’ curves in on itself more, and the lowercase ‘o’ is just a bit more open.
Put simply, Aptos is a beautiful font that instantly elevates the default typing experience in Microsoft Word. Unsurprisingly, though, not everyone is thrilled with this ‘upstart’ font.
So long, Calibri. Can’t say “we hardly knew ya” after 17 years, but I’m not cool with this new #Aptos upstart.cc @LanceUlanoff @glennf @artchung @kevinjdelaney @frerejones https://t.co/EvDpOwZwH9 pic.twitter.com/5ZW49e71uCMarch 11, 2024
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If I have one criticism of the new font it’s that its more open approach means each letter, word, and sentence, takes a little more space. Aptos offers 12 variations that include Light, Bold, Sem-Bold, and Black, but there’s no Narrow option. I wouldn’t mind seeing someone develop that.
I know; it’s just a font. But the fact is that fonts matter for readability, and even for setting a mood. Comic Sans is silly, informal, and worthy of comic strips, while Times New Roman is formal, official, and good for a legal document or a bill. Papyrus is good for nothing, and should be avoided at all costs. Aptos fits the bill as an every-person, every-situation font. It brings me just a little bit of joy, and I don’t miss Calibri a bit.