[1] As of October 22, 2019, it is hosted on 67,000 websites, and is served by the Google Fonts API approximately 74.8 million times per week.

[3] Amiri is a revival of a naskh typeface pioneered by the Bulaq Press (مطبعة بولاق), also called al-Mataabi' al-Amiriya (المطابع الأميرية), in 1905.

[4] On the 1905 typeface and of challenges of digitizing Arabic script,[5] Dr. Hosny wrote: "One of the most novel features of the Bulaq typeface is maintaining the aesthetics of Naskh calligraphy while meeting the requirements (and limitations) of typesetting, a balance that is not easily achieved."

The Amiri font makes extensive use of OpenType features to produce automatic positioning and substitutions, including wide varieties of contextual forms, ligatures and kerning to the Arabic letters and the verse number of āyah, and offers several optional features including character variants for specific letters and text figures for Arabic digits.

[8] The Amiri font itself was published and developed exclusively with free software, including FontForge, Inkscape, Python and VIM.