San Francisco Font Family

San Francisco is a neo-grotesque sans-serif typeface made by Apple Inc. It was first released to developers on November 18, 2014. It is the first new typeface designed at Apple in nearly 20 years and has been inspired by Helvetica and DIN.

The San Francisco typeface has three main variants: SF for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS; SF Compact for watchOS; and SF Mono for the Terminal, Console, and Xcode applications. Several other variants exist for internal use by Apple.

San Francisco was first introduced in watchOS only. The next year at WWDC, Apple released the watchOS font as SF Compact and at the same time introduced SF UI (generally called SF) for OS X El Capitan and iOS 9. In macOS High Sierra and iOS 11, SF UI was succeeded by SF Pro. Note: SF has the codename SFNS in macOS and SFUI in iOS, regardless the official name.

The main difference is that the sides of letters with round shapes, such as o, e, and s, are round in SF, whereas they are flat in SF Compact. The flat sides allow the letters to be laid out with more space between them, thereby making the text more legible at small sizes, which is particularly important for the Apple Watch.