Glenn Fleishman on Roboto:

Carter said last year, “All industrial designers, and I consider myself one, work within constraints. Architects have to build roofs that keep the rain out and so on. It’s particularly severe in the case of type designers, because what we work with had its form essentially frozen way before there was even typography. The Latin alphabet hasn’t changed in a very long time,” said Carter. (Carter declined to comment on Roboto in particular, but gave me permission to quote generally from last year’s interview.)

Duarte echoed this in an interview conducted a few weeks ago. He said, about constraints around developing interfaces and fonts for new media, that “The important thing is each of the new technologies creates new boundaries for new types of expression. There are new tradeoffs. For everything that is lost, there are new possibilities.”

Gruber says: Roboto is just the new Arial.

Source: Daring Fireball