Android 5.1 <http://officialandroid.blogspot.com/2015/03/android-51-unwrapping-new-lollipop.html>, released earlier this week, has added support for 25 minority scripts. The wide coverage can be reproduced by almost everybody for free, thanks to the Noto <https://code.google.com/p/noto/> and HarfBuzz <http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz/> projects, both of which are open source. (Android itself is open source too.)
By my count, these are the new scripts added in Android 5.1: Balinese, Batak, Buginese, Buhid, Cham, Coptic, Glagolitic, Hanunnoo, Javanese, Kayah Li, Lepcha, Limbu, Meetei Mayek, Ol Chiki, Oriya, Rejang, Saurashtra, Sundanese, Syloti Nagri, Tagbanwa, Tai Le, Tai Tham, Tai Viet, Thaana, and Tifinagh. (Android 5.0, released last year, had already added the Georgian lari, complete Unicode 7.0 coverage for Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic, and seven new scripts: Braille, Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherokee, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Sinhala, and Yi.) Note that different Android vendors and carriers may choose to ship more fonts or less, but Android One <http://www.android.com/one/> phones and most Nexus <http://www.google.com/nexus/> devices will support all the above scripts out of the box. None of this would have been possible without the efforts of Unicode volunteers who worked hard to encode the scripts in Unicode. Thanks to the efforts of Unicode, Noto, and HarfBuzz, thousands of communities around the world would can now read and write their language on smartphones and tablets for the first time.
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