Looks like the Hide My Email in apps feature won’t be ready in time for iOS 16 launch

Apple’s removed mentions of the new Hide My Email in apps feature, suggesting it may not be ready for prime time when iOS 16 launches this fall.

A macOS screenshot of the iCloud.com website showing setting up Apple's Hide My Email feature in Safari
Setting up Hide My Email on the iCloud.com website
  • What’s happening? Apple has removed the “Hide My Email in apps” feature from its macOS Preview webpage, indicating this enhanced email privacy protection may not be ready in time for the macOS Ventura launch this fall.
  • Why care? With it, you can keep your personal email address private in third‑party apps. Previously, this only worked in Apple’s Safari and Mail apps.
  • What to do? There’s nothing to be done about this other than hope that Apple has delayed this feature rather than postponed it indefinitely.

Hide My Email in apps may have been delayed

As the French website MacGeneration reported on August 12, 2022, the feature was delisted from the macOS Ventura Preview webpage at some point after August 4. Apple’s description of Hide My Email in apps reads as follows: “Hide My Email is integrated directly into QuickType keyboard suggestions, so you can keep your personal email address private in third‑party apps.”

At the time of writing, Hide My Email in apps is still present on Apple’s iOS 16 Preview and iPadOS 16 Preview webpages. If Apple removes mentions of the feature from those pages, we’ll be sure to let you know about it. For now, it looks like hiding your email in third-party apps on iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 is still on schedule.

If you have iCloud+, which is required for Hide My Email, you’ll want to keep your fingers crossed for the Hide My Email in apps feature to launch whenever it’s ready. If Apple has concluded that it needs a bit more time to perfect this feature, then it was probably too buggy to make it into the initial releases of iOS 16, iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura. Read: How to stop email tracking in Gmail and Apple Mail

How does Hide My Email in apps work?

Hide My Email was first introduced on the iPhone, iPad and Mac with iOS 15, iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey in 2021. Whit it, you can generate unique email addresses that automatically forward to your personal inbox.

From a privacy standpoint, it allows you to subscribe to any service which requires an email address to sign up but without revealing your real email address. You can respond directly to emails sent to these randomly generated addresses.

In iOS/iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey, the system automatically offers to create a unique address when an email field is selected in Safari. It also works in the Mail app (hit the FROM field) and when using the Sign in with Apple feature.

You can even create these unique email addresses that forward to your personal inbox using the iCloud.com webpage, as well as the Settings app on iOS/iPadOS and System Preferences on macOS. For further information about Hide My Email, check out Apple’s support document.

With iOS 16, iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura, Apple wants to enable people to use Hide My Email in third-party apps. No action is required on the developer’s part to support this feature. Instead, it “just works”.

All you need to do is select an email field in a third-party app like you would on a webpage in Safari and you could see a suggestion on the QuickType keyboard to use Hide My Email for increased privacy.

How to become an iCloud+ subscriber?

As mentioned earlier, you cannot use Hide My Email unless you have an iCloud+ subscription. But what is iCloud+ and how do you subscribe to it? It’s just a fancy marketing name for good ol’ iCloud storage upgrades.

Therefore, subscribing to the most affordable iCloud storage plane, which costs 99 cents/month for fifty gigabytes of storage makes you an iCloud+ subscriber, which gives you access to Hide My Email and other subscriber-only features such as custom email domains.

Visit Apple’s website for the full breakdown of iCloud+ storage plans and pricing.

Hide My Mail is included with iCloud+ storage plans, which start at $0.99 per month in the U.S. The feature is also available when creating an account in Safari using the “Sign in with Apple” feature. In the Mail app on macOS Monterey version 12.1 and later, Hide My Mail can be found in a pop-up menu in the “From” field.