The Font You Can’t Change

There are roughly 8.5 billion people on this planet, and a little under half of them have a WhatsApp account. Meta is understandably proud of that: more than 3 billion monthly active users, and over 2 billion every single day.

Its market value is closing in on $2 trillion, more than the economies of several countries combined. And I’d bet that every member of those countries’ governments has a WhatsApp account too, trading terrible jokes in group chats under the eyes and ears of Meta’s people. Those people swear on everything they hold dear that every conversation is end-to-end encrypted.

You and I, dear reader, have no say in any of this. The most we can brag about is changing the font in our chats, or switching to Signal in the hope that it’s safe and that nobody is watching except the CIA. We’ll assume they’re nice enough not to sell our conversations to a third party.

So let’s wander through Meta’s font maze.

What WhatsApp actually gives you

WhatsApp offers exactly four text styles, all in the same font. You get them by wrapping your text in special characters:

*Mohamed Khallaf*      →  bold
_Mohamed Khallaf_      →  italic
~Mohamed Khallaf~      →  strikethrough
```Mohamed Khallaf```   →  monospace

None of these changes the font itself. WhatsApp simply borrows your phone’s font, so what you see on your screen matches your system settings.

Changing the font on Android and iPhone

On Android: Settings → Display → Font, then pick a different one. WhatsApp follows along.

iPhone users, I’m sorry. You can change the size, but not the typeface.

The workarounds, and what they cost

There are always other routes, with side effects attached.

Unicode keyboards. These swap your letters for symbols that look like other fonts. They really do arrive on the other end. The price is that these keyboards ask for “full access” to everything you type, passwords included.

Rooting (Magisk/Xposed). This can change WhatsApp’s font completely. It also opens up a security attack surface, can void your warranty, and may get your account restricted, particularly on iPhone.

The one thing you’ll never change

The color of the font. Impossible, no matter what anyone tries to convince you. Everything marketed as “colored text” is either an image or a set of deceptive Unicode symbols.