Introduced in iOS 15, Hide My Email is an iCloud+ feature that does exactly what it says on the tin – you can create an alternative email address for each individual service you sign up for, and easily cut off said email whenever you’d like. It prevents advertisers from having your primary email address, and gives you better inbox control – a total win-win.
That said, despite being introduced 5 years ago, the feature hasn’t progressed as much as it realistically could have. Here are my suggestions for how Apple could improve Hide My Email.
For the longest time, Apple has believed that certain features shouldn’t be super exposed to the user, and instead just exist in the background. That was the case with iCloud Keychain for the longest time, until it finally got its own app in iOS 18.
The same is true for Hide My Email. If an app gives you the option to generate a new email in the keyboard, you can use it. This works great in Safari, system apps, and select third party apps – but it isn’t available everywhere. On macOS, it’s even more sparse.
Maybe it isn’t the most logical for Hide My Email to be its own app, but it could potentially make sense as part of Passwords. Either way, it’d be nice for the feature to be slightly easier to access – so it’s easier to create emails in places that don’t natively expose the keyboard integration.
Apple has had an iCloud Passwords extension in Chrome for quite some time, and believe it or not – it has gotten a lot better over the years. It’s gained support for passkeys, added support for iCloud 2FA codes, and even integrates autofill from your Messages app.
It’d also be nice if the Chrome extension allowed you to generate new a new Hide My Email address in any email field, similar to how it works in Safari. Ultimately you have to pay to use the service, so I don’t see any reason why Apple can’t make it play nicely with Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers.
Lastly, and this is more of a vanity feature – I think it would be cool if Hide My Email allowed you to use custom domains. Every email is an @icloud.com email address at the moment.
Apple does allow you to use your own domains with iCloud Mail, so theoretically it would be possible for Apple to set up aliases using your domain that tie into iCloud Hide My Email. I suppose this would have less of a privacy aspect to it, but it’d still allow you to easily cut off senders from your inbox when needed – while being able to use the domain you’d like.
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