I recall telling this story here on Lemmy not long ago - (and got downvoted some weeks ago for saying that it can happen on any distro… kids don’t know the real struggle I guess) - back in the day I swiped my HDD trying to install ubuntu 5.10 and lost all my data from uni and stuff. Still I can’t remember how I managed to install it after some attempts like a year after that or so.
I’d be upset about losing my data but truth is that somehow I was used to it - third world problems made it frequently due to not having a cd burner to burn my data and crappy IDE HDDs that got corrupted after a while just because. I still have some of them stored somewhere in hopes I could try to recover something from them someday, like some sort of cryogenic stuff.
My bet is “because historic reasons”.
I remember my Nokia 3220, which was the paradigm of phone personalization at its heyday. You could personalize almost everything of it - from its back cover to getting another chassis and/or keyboard with different colors, to its wallpaper, how things showed up in the “home” screen (wether if a list or a grid) to the ringtones and the light patterns they showed when the phone rang. You could even personalize said light patterns doing some dark magick with MIDI (I did one with the opening riff of Metallica’s “Hit the lights” back in the day). Frankly that phone was the tits and imho everything regarding fun but useful phones has gone downhill from there.
But about the font? No, you could not set a different one. There was no other different font, and am pretty sure it was the exact same typeface as the one in the 1100. It was hardcoded.
Same story with a Motorola Rokr Z6 I had the chance to have - you could personalize almost everything from it (it ran Linux under the hood!) except its font.
I’d say Android dragged those concepts from those old phones, and it was just like a couple years ago or so they went “oh! shit! oh! shit!” and remembered about the fonts - all we had meanwhile was the Roboto font in Android 5, which imho was a huge downgrade from the ol’ good Droid Sans family - so now they did some cheap ass effort to try to catch up. And meanwhile typeface formats have evolved a lot - not just bitmap fonts, not even just TrueType fonts, but OpenType fonts (I recall reading somewhere they’re Turing complete?) and now variable fonts. Supporting all of that stuff doesn’t seem easy, and it’s not like AOSP or Google like to put effort in stuff people actually care - they’d spend some time or it or they can choose a subset of all of that to make their lifes easier. If they want to, that is.
And not that in iOS things are better, though - I recall having to do some weird shit with mobile iTunes or something to set my mum’s favorite ringtone because it won’t allow custom ones that easily as we can in Android.