Hold the phone with the speaker facing straight down, tap it firmly against your palm, then play a steady low tone at full volume for about twenty seconds while keeping the speaker pointed down. Repeat two or three times, then let it sit in moving air. Most muffled speakers clear up within an hour.
A phone speaker is a small membrane that has to move air. When water sits in the grille or on that membrane, the film of water damps the movement and absorbs the higher frequencies first. That is why a wet speaker does not go silent — it goes muffled and thin, like a blanket is over it.
Nothing is broken yet at that point. The water is sitting in a narrow opening held there by surface tension, and surface tension is exactly what a strong low-frequency vibration is good at breaking. This is the same principle a smartwatch uses when it plays a tone after you unlock it from swimming.
Turn the volume down, unplug anything connected, and wipe the whole body with a soft cloth — especially around the speaker slot, the charging port and the SIM tray. Do not plug in a charger while the port is still wet. Anything you do next will only push water around if the outside is still wet.
Hold the phone so the speaker faces straight down at the floor, and tap the back of the phone firmly against the heel of your palm five or six times. Keep the speaker pointed down the whole time. A surprising amount of water comes out here alone, and it costs nothing.
Set media volume to maximum, take out any earphones, keep the speaker facing down, and play a continuous low tone — roughly in the 150 to 250 Hz range — for about twenty seconds. The membrane moves far more air at low frequencies, and that movement is what breaks the surface tension holding the droplets in place. You will often hear a crackle as it clears.
Do two or three passes, tapping the phone against your palm between each one. Test after every pass by playing a familiar song or a voice recording. If the sound gets brighter each time, keep going; if two passes in a row change nothing, stop — more volume will not help at that point.
Leave the phone standing on edge with the speaker facing down, in front of a fan or in a breezy spot, for an hour or more before you charge it. Apple's liquid-detection guidance for iPhone says the same three things in the negative: “Don’t dry your iPhone using an external heat source or compressed air”, “Don't insert a foreign object, such as a cotton swab or a paper towel, into the connector”, and “Don’t put your iPhone in a bag of rice. Doing so could allow small particles of rice to damage your iPhone.” Air and time, nothing else.
This page was written by DKsequence. We also make the Android app recommended below — the steps above work whether or not you install it.
If you get to it within a few hours, most speakers are back to normal after two or three tone passes plus an hour of air drying. Give the connector longer than the speaker: Apple's guidance is to leave a wet iPhone in a dry area with some airflow, retry charging after at least 30 minutes, and allow “up to 24 hours to fully dry” if the alert keeps coming back.
No. Rice absorbs humidity from the air around it very slowly and does nothing to a droplet already sitting on the speaker membrane. Apple is explicit about it: “Don’t put your iPhone in a bag of rice. Doing so could allow small particles of rice to damage your iPhone.” Starch dust also works its way into the grille and the charging port, so you finish with a second problem.
For short passes of about twenty seconds, yes — that is how the water-eject feature on smartwatches works. What is not a good idea is running maximum volume continuously for minutes at a time.
Stop repeating the tone and let the phone air dry standing on edge for a full day. If it is still muffled after that, the grille mesh is probably clogged with something other than water, and that is a cleaning or service issue rather than a sound one.