Why can't I use my iCloud email address as my Apple ID

Its so annoying that I have choice from FIOS, which discontinued my verizon.net email that WAS my appleid to migrate to a FREE service like gmail, or yahoo or AOL (VZ owns AOL and YAHOO--both of which have been hacked and phished so I am not keen on using any free email service-not that verizon.net was very great since it put all your family members into the master account and used antiquated POP servers). I am really flummoxed as Apple Mail uses fairly better IMAP Servers and is way ahead of Verizon Pop servers which are from 1970s and 80s I think..but I guess I should have kept my account as verizon.net (using AOL spoofing of FIOS emails available). Now my applid is gmail and Id think Apple would far prefer folks to want to use an APPLE mail service that one can receive and send emails on the native Apple mail and use the smart mailboxes etc. Else if I am gonna use email I have almost no reason to use APPLE Email and should just figure I am a web mail user and go into gmail on the web-never tried or thought you could use gmail mapped into Apple mail and if I can let me know--not that its likely worth it...It did work with Verizon Pop over Apple email as it was both web based and could be pulled individually. Anyway-a company as sophisticated as Apple could fix this with a tiny bit of energy--its kind of thing Jobs would be merciless if he was alive in skewering folks not fixing.

Add int he deprecated iPhoto and iLife stuff and there seems to hardly be much benefit to using apple products other than contacts syncing if you opt to do it-but nobody in my family does that as they cannot be bothered to learn icloud etc. ARGHH...fix this Apple and fix all your SW as you dont want to morph into the company follks flocked to you to avoid do you? lol

For your information, the exclusive use of Apple-domain email addresses have been locked down from the beginning of time. So, you can stop blaming this particular annoyance on the death of Steve. Alive or not, it wouldn't be any different now....

GB

I think from a technical perspective we want Apple to allow us to MERGE IDs. Apple, this would make SO MANY people happy, including me. It's like us early adopters are being punished. Yes, if we could go back in time and have never owned an Apple device and never created an Apple ID that required a third party email, we would not have this problem today if we created one from scratch for the first time.

This is the biggest joke I have ever seen in technology. I can change my Apple ID to any other email address in the world except for my @icloud.com email address. You can't make this stuff up. However, if I were to create a brand new Apple ID I could make it an @icloud.com email address. Sounds like Apple has a really hard time with SMTP addresses. The won't even let me delete my @.me email address as well. Apple has slowly become one of the most incompetent companies in technology.

Drew

I also find this really annoying but Goran Abdullah's answer was very helpful indeed. Thank you Goran, I've just sent the suggested feedback. thank you for taking the time to make that so easy, much appreciated

Goran's post doesn't do anything. Not to mention their are 27 pages of posts in here, think you could have included the link to this post. Doesn't really matter. I have contacted Apple Support and they have verified that this cannot be done.

Thanks,

Not sure what for, but thanks for your post.

All very will except I have a Microsoft email as my Apple ID and when anyone who uses iCloud calendars sends me an invitation, Apple hijacks it and send it to my Apple account which not only do I not use, but I haven't even got a calendar just the family calendar. So anyone using iCloud calendar sending me a calendar invitation will actually be sending it to my kids!

What a joke. No wonder I changed from Apple to Microsoft for all my cloud facilities.

4 years later, and if you have an email address that is @iCloud.com, then it is associated with an existing Apple ID, or it already is an Apple ID. It is not something that can be changed after the fact.

If you want an iCloud.com email address for your Apple ID, then you have to set up a new Apple ID on an iCloud sign-in screen that is not signed in. That will allow you to set up a new Apple ID, and it will be an iCloud.com ID, and it will have an iCloud account linked to the Apple account.

If you have some other type of email address for your Apple ID (like gmail.com for example), then at some point, you set up the iCloud account for that Apple ID, and an iCloud.com email address for that linked iCloud account was also created. They cannot be separated. The Apple ID can be changed to a different email address, and the linked iCloud account email will change accordingly. But it is not an entity in and of itself, so cannot be used as such.

Cheers,

GB

The entire point is that from a UXD perspective, without question, it should be possible to simply change an Apple ID's name/primary email from a third party email address (such as Gmail) to the iCloud email address that is already associated with/an alias for that Apple ID.

It's beyond perplexing that after all these years it still isn't possible to do that.

Agreed. Even from a software perspective, this is not a difficult feature to implement and makes no sense why it hasn't been added yet if Apple really wants to get everyone locked into their ecosystem.

Even from a software perspective, this is not a difficult feature to implement and makes no sense why it hasn't been added yet if Apple really wants to get everyone locked into their ecosystem.

Then why won't Google do it? Microsoft?

Neither if them allow a change to the core identity either. They each will allow an alias to provide another "nickname".

None of the major players allow it. Apple is not an outlier.

Then why won't Google do it? Microsoft?

Neither if them allow a change to the core identity either. They each will allow an alias to provide another "nickname".

None of the major players allow it. Apple is not an outlier.

Actually Google does. My Google account used my iCloud email as my account email. I just signed in to use Gmail for the first time, created an @gmail.com email and set it as my account just to test it myself. My Gmail and account email are now set to the new email, recovery is iCloud.

FWIW: I also learned in the process you cannot reverse it once it is set (which is now going to be annoying). So you're partially correct that you can't unset the Gmail as the account email. However, this entire thread is Apple users wanting their @iCoud.com email as their main AppleID email. Which Google does let user's do.

Well I just changed it. I've changed it 3 times: From @hotmail.com -> @iCloud.com -> @gmail.com and now I can no longer change it.

Edit: Adding picture for proof

<Image Edited by Host to Remove Personal Information>

I submitted feedback and a bug report on this long ago actually. No, I haven’t looked at the iCloud infrastructure because Apple has not released the source code. However, if I can use my my @iCloud.com email - which is an alias, - as a valid login to any Apple services, the relations between database tables already exist.

LACAllen wrote:

Even from a software perspective, this is not a difficult feature to implement and makes no sense why it hasn't been added yet if Apple really wants to get everyone locked into their ecosystem.

Then why won't Google do it? Microsoft?

Neither if them allow a change to the core identity either. They each will allow an alias to provide another "nickname".

None of the major players allow it. Apple is not an outlier.

In what universe has it become OK to hold Apple accountable to the abysmal UXD standards of Google and Microsoft? Apple stuff is expected to behave intuitively and to just work. The same isn’t even close to true for Google and Microsoft.

Having said that - and since you seem to insist on comparing apples to oranges (no pun intended) - it actually is possible to change a Google account’s primary email from a 3rd party email to Gmail and a Microsoft account’s primary email from a 3rd party email to Outlook.

If a Google account’s primary email is a 3rd party email address, it is possible to keep changing it around to any other 3rd party email address that is not already in use by another Google account. Same as with Apple ID. Difference is that with a Google account, it is also possible to change the primary email from a 3rd party email to the Gmail address that is associated with/an alias for the account in question. Once a Google account’s primary email is changed to Gmail however, it no longer is possible to change it at all, which is completely understandable from a lock-in perspective and which is all anybody here is asking for with respect to Apple ID. For reference, please see here Change the email address for your account - Google Account Help.

While Google only allows a one-way change to Gmail as described above, Microsoft has been reported to allow changes both ways, i.e. from and to Outlook How to Change the Primary Email Address for Your Microsoft Account.