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Apple Outrages Users By Automatically Installing U2's Album On Their Devices
Zanadou writes "Apple may have succeeded at breaking two records at once with the free release of U2's latest album, titled Songs of Innocence, via iTunes. But now, it looks like it's also on track to become one of the worst music publicity stunts of all time. Users who have opted to download new purchases to their iPhones automatically have found the new U2 album sitting on their phones. But even if iTunes users hadn't chosen automatic downloads, Songs of Innocence will still be displayed as an "iTunes in the Cloud" purchase. That means it will still be shown as part of your music library, even if you delete all the tracks. The only way to make the U2 album go away is to go to your Mac or PC and hide all of your "iTunes in the Cloud" purchases, or to use iTunes to manually hide each track from your purchased items list. Other reactions include rapper Tyler, The Creator saying that having the new U2 album automatically downloaded on his iPhone was like waking up with an STD. Update: 09/16 15:06 GMT by T : Note: Apple has released a fix.
It took me all of 5 seconds to hide the album in iTunes. All gone, I'll never see it again (unless I choose to unhide it).
Such a hardship.
I've had Steam put promotional stuff in my library automatically on a couple of occasions.
Yes it is Apple's fault. The expectation is that things the _user_ buys will be automatically downloaded, _not_ that things will download without the user doing actively something.
Your failure to understand such a basic thing makes me wonder why you are on a technology website...
This is a failure of user expectations - a obvious user interface problem.
It is also a failure of the accepted usage contract.
Sadly, it does not automatically download. Even with automatic downloads on. It automatically appears in the list of purchases and automatically appears in iTunes in the Cloud (if you have that option enabled), but it didn't automatically download.