Actually my response was - WHY build/work on this? I understand that licensing a font can cost a company a lot of money but there is no reason why a company of this size can't just use any of the thousands of open source fonts available. It is a waste of time/resources that is pretty characteristic of a big tech company (having worked at one).
In at least the cases I've seen - the reason why this happens is because design teams want to stand out and stamp their identity on the company. It is a reason to add imaginary value to internal "design studios" and promote designers to arbitrary titles.
And engineers, PMs, etc. mostly do the same. Create work, features, platforms that add no real value but simply to stamp their identity and pursue (effectively) self-promotion.
The original commenter makes a great point about saying that there are many other things to focus their energies. Okay, throwing engineers at a single problem is not a good way to do things.
But the AirBnB iOS app has been broken for ages. Various visual and functional bugs. Offline support is arguably the most important feature for an AirBnb app (if you're traveling and don't have service). But this hasn't been tackled at all.
Instead AirBnB engineers are going through all of their properties and updating their fonts, fixing issues with responsiveness/scaling, packaging on mobile platforms, etc. WHY?
The WHY is because they want a unique brand identifier. If they used a font anyone else could use then it would no longer be unique to the brand. Essentially they don't want you to feel comfortable or at home on a competitors site who may try to mimic their branding.
In at least the cases I've seen - the reason why this happens is because design teams want to stand out and stamp their identity on the company. It is a reason to add imaginary value to internal "design studios" and promote designers to arbitrary titles.
And engineers, PMs, etc. mostly do the same. Create work, features, platforms that add no real value but simply to stamp their identity and pursue (effectively) self-promotion.
The original commenter makes a great point about saying that there are many other things to focus their energies. Okay, throwing engineers at a single problem is not a good way to do things.
But the AirBnB iOS app has been broken for ages. Various visual and functional bugs. Offline support is arguably the most important feature for an AirBnb app (if you're traveling and don't have service). But this hasn't been tackled at all.
Instead AirBnB engineers are going through all of their properties and updating their fonts, fixing issues with responsiveness/scaling, packaging on mobile platforms, etc. WHY?