Difference when to use apple password or google

There's a difference between accounts and user names.

Lots of sites, which have their own accounts, want you to use an e-mail address as a user name. This helps to prevent two people from accidentally choosing the same user name, and may also provide an easy way to contact you (e.g., for sending "password reset" e-mails).

With Apple, there are two types of accounts:

• Your Apple Account – which is the same across all of your devices. It identifies you to Apple, and is used for all sorts of things – letting you order stuff from the Apple Store, App Store, and iTunes Store; logging in to post in these forums; keeping all of your iCloud data together; etc.
• Local accounts on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. These have their own passwords or passcodes. The iPhone and iPad are single-user devices, but still need a way of knowing "it's you" to protect your data.

The main user name for your Apple Account is an e-mail address, and it doesn't need to be an Apple one.

Google has their own accounts, and with those, the user name is the same as your Google e-mail address.

So you could have both

• An Google account whose user name is your Google e-mail address
• An Apple account whose user name is your Google e-mail address

The Google account would let you access Google services, and data stored with Google. The Apple account would let you access Apple services, and data stored with Apple. That's how you'd know which was which.

And for security reasons, you'd want your Apple account password to be different from your Google one, and both passwords to be non-trivial and hard to guess.

Every account you have should have a different passcode. I have a Gmail address. It has a passcode. I use my Gmail address as my Apple Account ID, but my Apple Account has its own password.

My user account (how I sign in) on my Mac has a different password.

Don't reuse passwords.

I have about 350 passwords. Fortunately, the Passwords app on all my Apple devices remembers them for me, so that way I can tell Passwords to create an “unbreakable” password that I don’t even have to know when I need a new login.

If you open the Passwords app and tap on Security it will warn you about all of your “risky” passwords. Some may not be important, such as visiting a public but free website, but anything financial like bank apps or for online purchasing you should have a strong, unique password.

There are also several good 3rd party “password vault” apps such as 1password or SplashID.

Like Lawrence and the others, I use the Password App to save and auto fill passwords for different sites.

see > Use the Passwords app to create, manage, and share passwords and passkeys across Apple devices - Apple Support

Pretty much everything these days now has a password.

The more important things will have two-factor authentication, which is a last-ditch defense against password compromise and against password phishing.

And to emphasize what was already mentioned elsewhere here, re-using passwords goes from wonderful and easy to complete and utter chaos and doom, just as soon as the first service sharing that same password becomes compromised.

PS: Apple wouldn't usually be asking for an email password, either. Not past the first time setup, or past some unexpected issue.

And I should have added, if that doesn't make sense, let us know. Try giving more details about what it is you don't understand. We'll try to get it sorted out.

One more thing that can confuse folks even more is that more and more sites have a "sign in with" option, i.e. sign in with Apple, Google, or Microsoft and even Amazon for some things.