How to Get Water Out of an iPhone Speaker

The routine

1. Take the case off and dry the outside

   Wipe the phone with a lint free cloth, including the edges. A case lip sitting over the speaker holes will catch anything the tone pushes out and hold it there.

2. Tap the phone gently, ports facing down

   Apple's own advice for a wet iPhone: tap it against your hand with the connector pointing down to shake the loose drops out. Do this before any sound.

3. Turn the volume up and lay the phone speaker down

   On a dry towel or cloth. The tone has to move the speaker membrane, and at low volume it barely will. Gravity should pull in the same direction.

4. Play a low, pulsed tone for about ten seconds

   This is the part Water Eject does. It plays bursts that slide between 150 Hz and 220 Hz, 700 milliseconds of sound followed by 300 milliseconds of silence, for about eleven seconds. The silence matters: each burst starts from rest and hits harder than a continuous tone.

5. Listen, and repeat if you need to

   Play a voice memo or a song. If the sound is still dull, run it once more after the short pause the app enforces. Two or three runs is normal. Ten is not going to help.

6. Leave it in dry air

   Somewhere with airflow, at room temperature. Apple says to wait at least 30 minutes before charging and that a phone can need up to 24 hours to dry out fully.

One tap, about eleven seconds.

Why a low tone moves water and a high one does not

A droplet stays in the grille because surface tension holds it against the mesh. To get it out you need the speaker membrane to travel a long way, which is what low frequencies do: the same power at 180 Hz moves the membrane far further than it does at 4 kHz. Push enough air through the opening and the droplet loses its grip.

This is not a trick. Apple Watch models with Water Lock clear their own speakers exactly this way when you turn the lock off. The iPhone has no equivalent built in, which is why third party tone apps exist at all.

The pulsing is the second half of the idea. A continuous tone settles the membrane into steady motion. Bursts separated by silence make it start and stop repeatedly, and the leading edge of each burst is the part that dislodges a droplet.

Four things that make it worse

When to stop and get it looked at

A tone reaches the speaker opening and nothing beyond it. Stop trying and go to a technician if the phone was submerged for more than a moment, if the liquid was sea water, pool water or a sugary drink, if the screen shows lines or discolouration, if the phone will not charge, or if it keeps showing the liquid detection alert after a day in dry air. See the first hour checklist for the wider triage.

If the sound stayed dull but the phone was never wet, you are probably looking at dust in the grille or one of the settings covered under muffled sound.

Questions

More guides

• iPhone speaker sounds muffledWater, dust, a setting or real damage. Tell them apart before you fix anything.
• Clean dust out of the speaker grilleSound first, then a soft brush and tape. What never to put in the holes.
• iPhone speaker test, one side at a timeA 660 Hz tone on the left, then the right, and how to read the result.
• Your iPhone got wetThe first hour, in Apple's order. No rice, no hair dryer, no charging.
• Water Eject shortcut or appAn honest comparison. Sometimes the free shortcut is the right answer.
• Does the iPhone have water eject?The Apple Watch clears its own speaker. The iPhone does not. Here is why.