How to provide custom font provider for downloadable fonts?

Question

I want to write a custom font provider to share fonts between apps. As I understand from docs font provider should be installed as separate application:

A font provider is an application that retrieves fonts

But how this application can be installed on user device? Ask user explicitly to install it from Google Play? It seems not very good user experience.

Answer 1

But how this application can be installed on user device?

The same way as any other application, AFAICT.

Ask user explicitly to install it from Google Play?

Or Yandex Store or wherever. Or, negotiate to have it be pre-installed on certain devices.

It seems not very good user experience.

It would be the same user experience as with any other app ever written for Android.

If some other app requires some specific font, which in turn specifically requires some specific font provider app, that would be a bad user experience. However, the problem here is in the app using the font, not the font provider itself.

Given all of the trouble of using a non-standard font provider, beyond the question of whether it is installed (e.g., have to bake in a certificate for it), I do not expect such providers to be very popular, except perhaps Google's own one (and even that I can't recommend using). IMHO, font providers feel very much like a solution in search of a real problem.