So it's iPhone launch day. I can see two guys asleep in camp chairs outside the mall from my kitchen window right now, at 7am, wrapped in the same fleece blankets they had on Wednesday. I am not one of those guys. My 5s works fine, my contract isn't up till February, and honestly the line photos every year make me feel more tired than impressed. Good for them though. Somebody's gotta be first.
What I actually spent my evening on this week was smaller and dumber: getting U2's Songs of Innocence off my phone.
Quick recap for anyone who missed the whole thing (unlikely, but): at the Apple event on the 9th, along with the new phones and the watch nobody can buy yet, Apple and U2 dropped their new album into every iTunes account on earth. Not "available to download." Not "here's a coupon." It just showed up. In your purchased list. On your phone. Whether you use iTunes or not, whether you've listened to a U2 record since Achtung Baby or not, it was there.
I didn't even notice at first (I don't sync my library that often) and then Tuesday I plugged my phone in for the iOS 8 update and there it was, thirteen new tracks sitting in my music app like they'd always been there. My first reaction was actually kind of funny, "when did I buy this," followed by about four seconds of genuine confusion before I remembered the whole giveaway thing.
Here's the part that annoyed me though. Free is free, fine, whatever, I don't even dislike U2 particularly (the first two Boy tracks are decent). But you could not just delete it like a normal song. Swipe to delete on the phone would remove the local file, sure, but it kept reappearing because it was tied to your purchase history. It'd resync right back next time you connected. People were posting screenshots of trying to delete fourteen times in a row. It became this weird little meme of its own, "how do I get rid of the U2."
Apple actually built a dedicated tool for this, which tells you something about how loud the complaints got. It's a page on their support site (just search "Apple removal tool U2" and it should be the first thing that comes up) where you log in with your Apple ID and it strips the album out of your purchase history entirely, like you never had it. That's the part that actually works. Deleting the local files off your device just hides the symptom.
Steps, if you're still fighting with this:
- Go to the iTunes support removal page (I'm not linking it because these things move around, just search it, it'll be obvious).
- Sign in with your Apple ID.
- There's a button that says something like "Remove album": click it.
- Give it a minute, then go back into Music on your phone and the tracks that were stuck re-downloading should finally stop coming back.
- If you'd already deleted the local files, you're done. If not, delete them now and this time they'll stay gone.
Takes about ninety seconds once you know where the button lives, which is the annoying part, because there was no reason it should've taken most people three tries and a Google search to find it.
While I had the update on my mind anyway, a couple actual iOS 8 things worth doing while you're in there, unrelated to the U2 saga:
- Turn on the new "Hey Siri" thing only if your phone's plugged in. It's a battery hog left on all the time, at least on my 5s.
- The keyboard now supports third-party ones. I put Swype on mine and it's already better than the stock keyboard for one-handed typing on the bus.
- Family Sharing is buried in Settings > iCloud and it's genuinely useful if you've got more than one Apple ID in a household, we finally stopped buying the same app twice.
None of that is as interesting as an unwanted rock album embedding itself into a hundred million phones without asking, though. That's the story that'll actually get told in a few years, not the camp chairs outside the mall. Anyway, my update finished, the album's gone, and I'm going to go make coffee and not stand in a line.