It's incredible that in 2025, Google has sprung for "basic competency" after operating a bad email service for 24 years.

In my case, many years ago I changed my last name. (Turns out a lot of women also do this when they do things like... get married. But also for a progressive company everyone's purchases being permanently locked to their deadname seems... bad.) But all of my Android apps, my entire digital life at the time, was permanently locked to my old name. I had another account I created as a mail forwarder but if people sent an invite to it for a Google thing it wouldn't connect to my real account, and obviously there was an added security risk of someone stealing my forwarding account.

I remember talking to Yonatan Zunger about this problem during the Google+ era and it seemed to be renaming an account wasn't something the company was capable of.