The Breaker Times

Every day for the last four years, dozens of people have shown up in the comments of one particular YouTube, declaring their love and appreciation for the content. The content: two minutes and six seconds of deep, low buzzing, the kind that makes your phone vibrate on the table, underscoring a vaguely trippy animation of swirled stained glass. 

It’s not a good video. But it’s not meant to be. The video is called “Sound To Remove Water From Phone Speaker ( GUARANTEED ).” There are many others like it, too. And the comments — “the community,” as so many there refer to it — are almost all people who just got their phone wet in one way or another. “Walked through a river with the phone in my pocket,” one recent one says. “Yeah the steam from the shower is the reason I’m here,” says another. “Was using my phone in the shower this is a lifesaver.” They go on and on like this, many of them from repeat offenders. “We are back once again the 3rd time this month.” “its been 3 weeks and im back again.” “Dropped my shit in the shower AGAIN!”

For more on our wet phone mystery (and the future of AR headsets), check out this episode of The Vergecast.

If you believe the comments, about half the video’s 45 million views come from people who bring their phone into the shower or bathtub and trust that they can play this video and everything will be fine. I encountered it for the first time earlier this year after my nephew’s phone slipped out of his pocket and into a river near our Airbnb in a tiny town in Virginia. We semi-miraculously found his phone, then brought it inside and started trying to dry it off. A moment later, one of his friends just casually suggested playing “one of those videos that gets the water out.” We put on “Sound To Remove Water From Phone Speaker ( GUARANTEED ),” and ultimately, the phone was fine.

Ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out whether these videos really work. Are all these lucky shower scrollers just the beneficiaries of phones that have become far more waterproof and rugged in recent years? Or should we stop recommending rice and start recommending “Sound To Remove Water From Phone Speaker ( GUARANTEED )”? 

The first thing I did was ask phone makers what they thought. No one at Apple, Google, or Samsung offered a more interesting answer than to point to a generic “what to do if your phone gets wet” support page, but a couple of other folks I talked to indicated they thought the theory seemed reasonable enough.

The theory goes like this: all a speaker is really doing is pushing air around, and if you can get it to push enough air, with enough force, you might be able to push droplets of liquid out from where they came. “The lowest tone that that speaker can reproduce, at the loudest level that it can play,” says Eric Freeman, a senior director of research at Bose. “That will create the most air motion, which will push on the water that’s trapped inside the phone.” Generally, the bigger the speaker, the louder and lower it can go. Phone speakers tend to be tiny. “So those YouTube videos,” Freeman says, “it’s not, like, really deep bass. But it’s in the low range of where a phone is able to make sound.” 

The best real-world example of how this can work is probably the Apple Watch, which has a dedicated feature for ejecting water after you’ve gotten it wet. When I first reached out to iFixit to ask about my water-expulsion mystery, Carsten Frauenheim, a repairability engineer at the company, said the Watch works on the same theory as the videos. “It’s just a specific oscillating tone that pushes the water out of the speaker grilles,” he said. “Not sure how effective the third-party versions are for phones since they’re probably not ideally tuned? We could test.”

The company did, in fact, test. Shahram Mokhtari, iFixit’s lead teardown engineer, and Chayton Ritter, an engineering student who also works with iFixit’s editorial department, took four phones and got them wet. We went with an iPhone 13, a Pixel 7 Pro, a Pixel 3, and a Nokia 7.1, all chosen not scientifically but because they were the devices I had handy and was willing to destroy in the name of science. Each phone went into a UV bath for about a minute, after which Ritter took it out, tapped it to get some water out, played one of the water-ejection videos, and left it out overnight. The next day, he checked to see where there was still residue from the UV dye, an indication that liquid had gotten in and not come out.

The results were all over the place. The Pixel 7 Pro was essentially bone dry, the Nokia 7.1 was more or less ruined, and the iPhone 13 and Pixel 3 were somewhere in between. But these aren’t perfectly controlled tests, Mokhtari was careful to note: a phone’s seal can change over time or be broken in unnoticeable ways. He and Ritter both said emphatically that no matter what your phone maker advertises or what you’ve experienced before, it’s always a risk to get your phone wet. And it gets riskier over time.

As to the YouTube video’s role, though, the evidence was fairly clear. It works! A little. As he played the video on each phone, Ritter also took close-up video of the speaker on each phone, and in every case, the phone immediately blasted out a flurry of droplets. The effect didn’t last long, but it was clearly ejecting water that wasn’t coming out otherwise. 

The videos weren’t a complete solution to the problem, though. A smartphone’s speaker seems to be powerful enough to push air out from right next to the speaker, but not to solve problems elsewhere in the device — particularly underneath the buttons, the USB port, or the SIM card slot, which were the other most common intrusion spots. And if it didn’t get the liquid out in that first burst, Ritter found it mostly just sloshed the droplets back and forth as the speaker moved. So, he says, “I say [the videos] kind of work. It can’t hurt, but I don’t see it being an end-all-be-all fix or a way to pull all the liquid out.”

That might be why companies like Apple and Samsung don’t offer water expulsion as a feature for their phones, when they do for their smartwatches. “There are fewer cavities and holes in the watches than there are on the phones, which allows them to design to push the water out from those cavities,” Mokhtari says. “On the phone, the speakers are located at the bottom and the top of the phone, which means you can’t get to cavities like the SIM card slot. It’s just not possible to push water out from those cavities.”

The good news for the shower scrollers is that phones really are getting more water-resistant: three of the four phones Ritter tested still worked fine, and the newest of them, the Pixel 7 Pro, had no lingering liquid at all. The bad news is that there’s no guarantee they’ll stay water-resistant forever. And the really bad news is that if you’re showering with your phone, you’re tempting fate even more. “I don’t know what other stuff is in shampoo,” Ritter says, “but it’s probably more conductive — very rarely are you getting what amounts to perfectly fresh water inside of your iPhone.”

So, sure, bookmark a water-expulsion video, and load it up in case of emergency. Join the “Sound To Remove Water From Phone Speaker ( GUARANTEED )” community, where everyone seems to root for each other’s device survival. But don’t trust it too much. Everyone I talked to ended up offering the same bit of advice: just keep your phone out of the shower.