This is not about configuration. Apple provides a proxied email and controls the forwarding. They can disable that and prevent the company from sending anything to a customer. What part of that is not true?
It’s not true in that this is not mandatory. Users are free to provide a non-private or even a non-Apple email. Apple only has as much control as your users give them. If you think that’s bad, maybe you should consider why those users don’t trust you.
As a user I value this debate because it highlights a pitfall I had not considered. I suspect many people will not not immediately think of the downside to going through apple
As I understand the original commenter's position it is that:
1. when your business is on the app store it can be difficult not doing whatever Apple wants you to do because not doing what they want you to do can come close to destroying your business. This has often been compared to being a hostage of Apple.
2. If you suddenly decide to stop paying the Apple tax or if Apple decides to ban you - cutting you off from new business - it can certainly be problematic and can kill many businesses but you could theoretically keep going because you could have a customer base you inform of your decision and tell them to download your app from your homepage instead of the app store etc.
In short - in the event of Apple not liking you anymore you can communicate with your customers.
3. In this new setup if Apple does not like you anymore you cannot tell your customers hey Apple doesn't like me anymore.
Thus Apple increases its ability to hold your company hostage and thus I do not believe it is the same logic as Google controls Gmail unless when selling an Android app Google only allows you to do so if your customer has a Gmail account.
Yes, that's also a problem that people have brought up several times in other stories. Google/Gmail has outsized control, is a major source of spam, and changes or breaks email standards whenever they want.
Centralization of communications is not a good thing and it's worth discussing whether we're going in the right direction.
Google does not have a mapping between an application and email address the customer used in that application. Also Google is not really enticing a customer not to provide the service provider any email address other than the ones in the mapping.
FastMail, ProtonMail, or an AWS server upon which your run your own email can also be disabled by the owner of that service. Unless you run your own on-premise server, that risk always exists. And even then, your ISP could block your server. There comes a point when the paranoia gets unreasonable.
I suspect that GP originally wrote "so you cant actually communicate with your customer", to which I answered in the next minute, and later added "if they don't want you to." (If not, my mistake for misreading.)
