While many look forward to iOS 18.1 for the first Apple Intelligence features, this next update will deliver some other useful changes. Among them is a more direct way to change the primary email address associated with your Apple Account.
The primary email address is what you use to sign in to your Apple Account. Apple has long allowed customers to change the primary email address and notes that making this change won't impact your contacts, purchases, or other account information. The issue is that changing it to date feels a bit uncertain: On an iPhone, you have to remove the email address from your account first, and then iOS will prompt you to choose another email address to your primary address.
This is changing in iOS 18.1. As is the case today, you can view the email addresses and phone numbers associated with your Apple Account by opening the Settings app, tapping your name at the top, and navigating to Sign In & Security. And you can still remove any account or phone number as before. But iOS 18.1 adds a new "Primary Email" option to the page you see when you view a non-primary email account. You can toggle this to "On" to change the primary email account to the account you're current viewing, and doing so won't remove the previous primary email from the account.
Thanks to Macrumors for discovering this subtle but useful change. We expect Apple to release iOS 18.1 along with the first Apple Intelligence features on October 28.