Take the case off, stop charging, and hold the phone speaker-down while you tap it against your palm. Then play a steady 150 to 200 Hz tone at maximum volume for about twenty seconds, opening still pointing down, two or three passes. Judge each pass against the same recording, then dry it in moving air for several hours.
The muffled quality is a clue in itself. A film of water in front of the diaphragm adds mass and damping, and high frequencies — which need small, fast movements — are the first thing that dies. Low frequencies survive. So the speaker does not go quiet, it goes thin and covered, as if a blanket were over it. A driver that is actually damaged tends to rattle, crackle or distort as you raise the volume instead, which is a different sound and a different problem.
Muffled right after water is not the same as broken. Water sitting in a narrow grille opening is held there by surface tension, and vibration is very good at breaking surface tension. At that moment nothing has been destroyed. What destroys things is what usually happens next: plugging in a charger while the port is still damp, or reaching for a hair dryer.
A clear-sounding speaker does not mean a dry phone. When Android Authority put water-eject tone videos to a real test on an iPhone 13, Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 3 and Nokia 7.1, the tone 'wasn't able to solve problems from other entry points like the USB port or the SIM card slot.' Sound only ever treats the opening it comes out of.
Stop charging immediately and do not plug in again while the port area is damp — that is where real damage happens, at the contacts, not at the speaker. Wipe the whole body with a dry microfibre cloth and pay attention to the speaker grille, the charging port and the SIM tray. Pull the case off too: a case will happily hold a small puddle against the grille for hours, and everything you do afterwards is wasted while that puddle is there.
Play a familiar spoken-word recording — a voice memo, not music, because voices expose dullness far better than a song. Then hold the phone to your ear as if on a call and compare the earpiece with the bottom speaker. If only the wet side sounds covered, it is water. If both sound wrong, suspect the audio route instead, and restart the phone once, which also clears a stuck output. Skipping this is how people spend an hour blasting tones at a problem that was actually a Bluetooth speaker in the next room.
Hold the phone so the speaker points at the floor and tap the back firmly against the heel of your palm five or six times, keeping the opening downward the whole time. This costs nothing and it removes the biggest droplets — which are exactly the ones a tone struggles with, because a large slug of water is heavy enough to damp the diaphragm that is supposed to be pushing it.
Media volume to maximum, earphones out, Bluetooth off, speaker still facing the floor. Play a steady low tone for about twenty seconds — around 150 to 200 Hz, and 165 Hz is the value the common water-eject tools settled on. Tap the phone against your palm again, then re-test with the same recording. Two or three passes is the useful range. If two consecutive passes change nothing you can hear, stop; past that point you are only heating the voice coil.
Water rarely lands in one opening only. Record ten seconds of your own voice with the phone's recorder and play it back: a wet microphone sounds distant and boxy, and on a call you would never hear it yourself, because the person on the other end is the one receiving it. If the recording is dull, repeat the tapping with the microphone hole facing the floor — it sits on the bottom edge beside the charging port, with a second one at the top. Then record again and compare. Do this before you decide the phone is fine.
Stand the phone on edge with the opening facing down, in front of a fan or somewhere with moving air, and leave it for several hours before charging — overnight if it was properly soaked. Skip the hair dryer: heat drives moisture further in and stresses adhesive and battery. Skip the bowl of rice as well. It draws ambient humidity slowly and does nothing whatsoever to a droplet already sitting inside, while starch dust finds its way into the grille and the port.
This page was written by DKsequence. We also make the Android app recommended below — the steps above work whether or not you install it.
Judge the speaker after two or three tone passes and an hour of moving air, but do not judge the phone that early. Apple's liquid-detection guidance for iPhone is to leave it 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 returning. Samsung's equivalent guidance says moisture in the charging port “will naturally evaporate” in roughly one to two hours. Sound comes back first; dryness takes considerably longer.
It changes which way up you hold the phone, and nothing else. A tone only moves water in the driver it is coming out of, so route the sound through the wet one: play the tone during a call on speakerphone-off to drive the earpiece, or normally to drive the loudspeaker, and keep that opening facing the floor throughout. If both sound muffled at once, stop treating it as water — that pattern points at the audio route or an output stuck on a Bluetooth device, and a restart is a faster test than another tone pass.
Almost always because water was still inside and moved. Cavities behind the grille hold moisture that migrates and re-wets the membrane as the phone changes temperature or orientation. Give it a full day standing on edge with the opening down before you decide anything is wrong, and do not charge it in the meantime.
The port, and by leaving it alone. Samsung blocks charging when it detects moisture in the port and says plainly that this is “a preventative measure added to avoid corrosion”, with the water evaporating on its own in about one to two hours; wireless charging still works on supported devices in the meantime. Apple's guidance is the same shape — unplug, wait at least 30 minutes, and allow up to a day if the alert keeps coming back. No tone reaches the port, so the speaker procedure on this page and the port are two separate waits running in parallel.
Stop repeating tones — at that point they are not the tool. Two days of air with no improvement means it is no longer a droplet in the grille: either residue is left behind on the membrane, or the driver took damage. Both are service questions, and both get worse if you keep running maximum-volume passes at them.