The Droid family of fonts was designed by Ascender's Steve Matteson beginning in the fall of 2006. The goal was to provide optimal quality and reading comfort on a mobile handset. The Droid fonts were optimized for use in application menus, web browsers and for other screen text. Ascender Corporation worked closely with Google and the Open Handset Alliance to develop these system fonts for Android, a free, open source, and fully customizable mobile platform.