Shout it from the rooftops, for it has come to pass.

In the latest update to the iPhone operating system, iOS 13.1, there’s a radio button control in the Settings>>Music section that allows you to Show (or, more importantly, not show) All Purchases.

I’ve been complaining since February 2016 about this most vexing “feature” of the Apple Music app, and I’ve been hoping ever since the introduction of iOS 10 that it would be fixed. (This is over and above my intense dislike of Apple Music as a streaming service. All I want is an app to play back the music on my phone that I put there.) I’ve even spent time with Apple Support, but even explaining the problem seemed impossible: it was like talking to a Westworld robot about something it had been programmed not to see.

Tl;dr: even though I curate my own playlist for my phone, and tell Music not to ever use mobile data, it would still regularly start playing the first alphabetical song in my “purchased” items, even though it wasn’t downloaded onto my phone and even though I was miles from the nearest wifi (in my car, for example).

Honestly, the number of songs-that-begin-with-A which have been exiled to the Siberian salt mines of never-want-to-hear-again because of this bug. All victims of the cloth-eared marketing monkeys who (almost certainly) wanted to socially engineer Apple Music streaming signups.

But here we are in the Autumn of 2019, and it really seems as if the problem might be fixed, with that simple fucking radio button.

Time will tell, of course, but the two screen shots above, one from 2016, and the other from today, tell the tale. The greyed out tracks in 2016 are the ones that would play against my wishes, even though mobile data was off. And now: no greyed out tracks. That’s the list of “Songs” not just “Downloaded Music>>Songs”.

I wonder how long it will be before I can bear to hear “Above the Clouds” again?