iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

Let's be real: Apple didn't do this out of the goodness of their corporate heart. They did it because the backlash was getting loud enough to threaten the walled garden's structural integrity. Hide My Email was always a clever feature — generate a throwaway relay address that forwards to your real inbox, and if spammers find it, just kill it and move on. But the catch was always the lock-in: stop paying for iCloud+, and Apple would hold those addresses hostage, breaking logins across every service where you'd used them. That's not a feature, that's a trap. The change, buried in Apple's developer news feed (because of course it was), means those addresses will remain functional on icloud.com even after you downgrade. It's the bare minimum of decency — keeping a promise that was implicit when you signed up. But it took public pressure, HN threads hitting 453 points, and the stink of a class-action lawsuit in the air to get here. That's the pattern with Apple: they ship the walled garden first, then dismantle it brick by brick only when the outrage exceeds the cost of compliance. What's notable here is the technical honesty. Apple's relay infrastructure was always designed to keep these addresses alive — the limitation was purely administrative. They chose to break your logins when you left. That's not a technical constraint, it's a business decision disguised as one. And now that they've reversed it, the question becomes: what else is a "technical limitation" that's actually just a retention strategy? The answer, historically, is a lot. This also lands in a broader context of platform providers realizing that identity portability isn't optional anymore. Whether it's Apple, Google, or the fediverse push, users are demanding that their digital identities follow them, not be held ransom. Apple's concession is a small win, but it's a reminder that every "convenience" feature in a walled garden is a potential lock-in mechanism waiting for a court order to unlock it. Source: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=1ptvdtcm