The news
Apple has decided against merging its two email relay services onto a single domain. New Sign in with Apple relay addresses created later this year will move to private.icloud.com. Existing addresses ending in privaterelay.appleid.com will keep forwarding mail without interruption. Hide My Email addresses created through iCloud+ will remain on the icloud.com domain.
The reversal came after the company reviewed feedback from users and developers who objected to the June plan to consolidate both features under private.icloud.com.
Context
Apple first described the consolidation in June. The stated aim was to simplify the backend systems that power the two privacy tools. Both services generate temporary addresses that forward mail to a user’s real inbox while shielding the actual address from the recipient.
Sign in with Apple relay addresses appear only on websites and apps that have implemented the feature. Hide My Email addresses can be created and used on any site or form that accepts an email address. That difference in exposure became the central point of objection once the shared domain was announced.
After the June post, developers and users pointed out that placing Hide My Email addresses on the distinctive private.icloud.com domain would make them easier to recognize as Apple-generated relays across a much wider set of services.
Details
The change applies only to new Sign in with Apple addresses issued after the switch. Those addresses will end in private.icloud.com instead of privaterelay.appleid.com. Addresses already in circulation on privaterelay.appleid.com will continue to function for both sign-in and mail forwarding.
Hide My Email addresses tied to an iCloud+ subscription stay on icloud.com. Apple’s announcement makes clear that the decision followed direct input from the community about how the domains are observed by third-party sites.
The original objection rested on the different visibility patterns of the two services. Sign in with Apple addresses are shown only to participating sites, so a recognizable domain carries limited risk of broad filtering. Hide My Email addresses, by contrast, can be entered on any website. A single distinctive domain for both would have created a consistent marker that site operators could use to identify or treat Apple relay addresses differently in many more contexts.
Apple did not release additional technical specifications about the private.icloud.com domain or the forwarding infrastructure behind it. The company simply stated that existing addresses on privaterelay.appleid.com would remain operational and that Hide My Email would keep its current domain.
Reactions
No formal statements from other companies or industry groups have appeared yet. The discussion has stayed within developer forums and the comments on Apple’s own developer news post. The feedback cited in Apple’s update focused on practical effects for users who rely on Hide My Email to avoid giving real addresses to a wide range of services.
Why it matters
The reversal leaves the two relay systems distinguishable by domain even though they perform similar forwarding tasks. For users who generate Hide My Email addresses across many unrelated sites, the icloud.com domain avoids creating an obvious signal that could prompt different treatment from site operators. Sign in with Apple keeps its own domain for new relays, which matches the narrower set of sites that ever see those addresses.
The outcome shows Apple adjusting a planned infrastructure change after objections about real-world usage patterns surfaced. It also preserves the current behavior that many iCloud+ subscribers already rely on, so no changes are required in how they create or manage addresses for either service.
The episode illustrates a recurring pattern: privacy features that work well in isolation can create new identification risks when their external markers are unified. By keeping the domains separate, Apple maintains the existing distinction without additional user effort.
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