Bumi Laras Selatan is a typeface based on Instrument Sans, with a name inspired by Reinhart’s old house address (2003-2010). You can check out and download them here.

What happened to your complete system font stack?

There is almost nothing wrong with our system font stack, except for one thing. Roboto, the default Android system font, is being seriously abandoned by major Android manufacturers including Google.

With the advent of Google Sans, HarmonyOS Sans (HUAWEI), MiSans (Xiaomi), One UI Sans (Samsung), and OPPO Sans, it seems that major Android makers no longer wants to embrace Roboto at all.

The search of this typeface was shortly founded as a side-quest, a research to find a better, open-source typeface that more accurately represent the characteristics of these new Roboto replacements. The main purpose was originally to help app developers find a typeface for their native Android app that matches with the more diverse selection of OEM-specific system fonts.

We found some suitable alternatives, including Inter and Onest, but we also found Instrument Sans and Inter to be good with some tweaks.

At the end of the day, we choose to modify Instrument Sans into the typeface we are announcing today. While the typeface itself is technically based on Instrument Sans, the aesthetics of Bumi Laras Selatan matches closely with many of these replacements, especially Samsung’s One UI Sans and the latest iteration of OPPO Sans:

• The design of numeric 1 resembles that of OPPO Sans.
• The designs of numeric 6 and 9 follows that of Google Sans and One UI Sans.
• The design of the uppercase G is inspired by MiSans.
• The sharp-pointed lowercase t is heavily inspired by One UI Sans.

We found this to be a good opportunity to establish a gradual rebrand, so why it’s here.