Recently I got this awesome phone, but I wanted to add one last finishing touch of customization to my shiny new device: install custom system fonts on the Google Pixel 2 XL.

Most font changers can only install fonts properly with a rooted device, but none of them really got me all the way there. While three of the more popular apps sort of worked, I still had problems like certain bold/italic variants missing, and boxes (missing characters) displaying on the lock screen.

After quite a bit of trial & error and re-flashing the Android Oreo 8.1 system image, I was able to get my favorite font (Exo 2, the same font in use here on this site) working across the entire O/S.

The way most font changers work is by renaming the font (plus all of its variants) to Roboto-Variant.ttf and then copying over top of the fonts in the #System(Root)/system/fonts directory.

What I found after digging into this, was another font in that directory which apparently takes priority over the Roboto filename: GoogleSans. So, once the font switcher app does its initial copy/rename operation, you still have to go in that directory and copy over the GoogleSans fonts to get the variants to work.

I found it easier to do all of this manually using File Explorer (with the File Explorer Root Addon) as there were only about 5 files to replace.

Roboto-Regular.ttf -> GoogleSans-Regular.ttf
Roboto-Bold.ttf -> GoogleSans-Bold.ttf
Roboto-BoldItalic.ttf -> GoogleSans-BoldItalic.ttf
Roboto-Medium.ttf -> GoogleSans-Medium.ttf
Roboto-MediumItalic.ttf -> GoogleSans-MediumItalic.ttf

Once again, it should go without saying but you need to be rooted in order for this to work, and always have good backups before you proceed. Once making the file switch and rebooting, all of the new fonts were working everywhere as expected.

In case something gets messed up in the process, here is a ZIP backup of the system/fonts directory.

Also, in case you were wondering which font switcher app I used, it’s the free version of an app called TypeFace. Previously, I tried both iFont and HiFont, they were unable to install an entire font family (and I found all of the misspellings in each to be mildly irritating).

Hopefully this allows you to install custom system fonts on the Google Pixel 2 XL without too much trouble.