Which way you sign in, and getting into the website

There are three ways into an account: an email address and a password, Continue with Google, and — on an iPhone — Sign in with Apple. Whichever you used the first time is the one that works from then on. Nothing in either app switches an account from one to another, nothing unlinks one, and nothing needs to: the way you signed up keeps working.

If you signed up with Google, the website works exactly the same way: open slugstats.com, click Continue with Google, pick the same Google account, and you are in your own stats. It is one account reached from two places, not a website account and a phone account. What does not work is the email-and-password form, because a Google or Apple signup has no password on it until somebody adds one — so the form answers "Invalid email or password" however carefully you type it, which reads like a wrong password and is really "this account has no password to check".

If you signed up with Apple, the same thing is true with one extra step, because the website has no Apple button at all. Signing in with Apple exists on the iPhone app and nowhere else — not on Android, not in a browser — so the route onto the website is to give the account a password from inside the app first, and then sign in with your address and that password. Nothing is lost and nothing moves; the Apple button on your phone keeps working afterwards.

Which address is "your address" is the part that catches people here. If you used Apple's Hide My Email, your sign-in address is the forwarding one Apple invented — something at privaterelay.appleid.com — and not the address you read your mail at. You do not have to remember it: the Password screen prints it under YOUR SIGN-IN EMAIL and it is selectable, so you can copy it straight out.

Signing in with Google on an address that already had an email-and-password account does not make a second account: the two are joined, and from then on either way in lands on the same stats. That is also why there is no "duplicate account" to merge later, and why signing in the other way is never the reason a season looks empty.

Two things genuinely cannot be done. An account's email address cannot be changed, so the address you signed up with is the account; and a provider cannot be removed from an account once it is on it. Adding a password is the only change to how you sign in that either app offers, and it only ever adds a way in.

Apple is also the reason some accounts are called Player. Apple offers your name only on the very first sign-in with an app and shares nothing afterwards, and nothing here guesses a name out of an email address — so a phone signup that arrived without one is asked "What should we call you?" on the way in, and an account created on the website from a provider that shared nothing stays Player until you set it yourself.

If you started on the phone without an account at all — Continue without an account — there is nothing to sign in to yet and nothing on the website to reach: that data is on the phone only. The Password screen says so rather than offering a form, and signing up keeps what you have already recorded.