Google Sans font is coming for the rest of your Chromebook

Over the past few months, as the Material You design language has taken over most parts of the ChromeOS UI, you may have noticed a new font being injected in many parts of your Chromebook. That font – a far more rounded and Google-y typeface than the current Roboto we’ve had for years – is called Google Sans. It’s what you see on all of Google’s front-facing products and on many of their internal websites as well.

The Google Store, The Keyword, the Chromebook homepage, etc. all use Google Sans to varying degrees. To see it full on display, this post at The Google Store uses Google’s new-ish font in every facet of the page. From menus to headings to paragraph fonts, Google Sans is everywhere and it looks fantastic.

I’ve long loved the Google Sans font since back when it was called Product Sans. There’s a fantastic look to it that is both inviting and modern, and the fact that they’ve crafted it in a way to work in headings, standard text, buttons and every other place you need a font makes it a great candidate for ChromeOS.

More Google Sans is on the way

Now, don’t hear me saying there’s no trace of this font on your Chromebook. Right now, actually, if you were to inspect your Files app, you’d quickly see that most of the fonts in that system app are already Google Sans. It’s also in the Quick Settings tray and in the app launcher, too. But there are places here and there where the ChromeOS team has yet to update it, and that’s where this new change will have a great affect on the look and feel of multiple places in ChromeOS in the future.

Thanks to a find by 9to5 Google, it looks like Google is ready to pull the trigger and make Google Sans the default font across the board for ChromeOS. To align with their recent design language, Chromebooks will now display most things via Google Sans versus the outgoing Roboto, though it looks like the latter will stick around as a backup font for when things don’t quite work with Google Sans.

It’s a change that sounds big, but will likely feel quite subtle when it arrives. As 9to5 Google notes, there are no associated feature flags for this change, so when they flip the switch, it will just be live across the board. We’ll certainly be on the lookout for it, but the fact that this change in the Chromium Gerrit is not yet merged tells me we at least won’t be seeing it until ChromeOS 125 as 124 should be landing this week. Either way, it won’t be too long before – for the vast majority, anyway – we’ll say a final goodbye to Roboto on Chromebooks and hello to Google Sans.