A modern phone is far more likely to survive a dunking than one from ten years ago, and far more likely to be finished off by the response than by the water. Almost everything on the list of things not to do is something well-meaning and widely recommended.
The single most useful principle: water does not destroy electronics, current through wet electronics does. Which is why the most important thing you can do in the first minute is also the thing that feels like doing nothing.
What to do when a phone gets wet
The first thirty minutes after a phone goes in water, in the order that matters.
Get it out and power it down
If it is still on, turn it off — properly off, not just locked. If it is already off, leave it off. A device with water bridging two contacts and no power flowing is generally fine; the same device with power flowing is where corrosion and short circuits start. This is the whole ball game and it takes ten seconds.
Do not plug it in. Not for anything.
Not to charge, not to check it, not to back it up. A wet charging port with 5 volts across it is the single most reliable way to turn a wet phone into a dead one. Modern iPhones and many Android phones will refuse to charge and show a liquid-detection warning; if you see it, that warning is right and overriding it is a mistake.
Take everything off and out
Case off, screen protector edge wiped, SIM tray out, anything plugged in unplugged. Water pools between a case and the phone and stays there for hours, quietly running back into every opening. This is also the moment to check whether it went in fresh water or something worse — see the salt water note below.
Dry the outside and get the water out of the openings
Soft dry cloth over everything. Then hold the phone with the ports and grilles facing down and tap it gently against your palm to shake water out of the charging port, the speaker slots and the earpiece. Down, always — you are using gravity, and the moment you tilt it up you are putting the water back.
Leave it somewhere dry and airy for a few hours
A room with moving air at room temperature. Not a hairdryer, not a radiator, not an airing cupboard, not a bag of rice. Residual moisture inside evaporates and leaves through the same openings it came in, and that process wants time and air, not heat. Overnight is better than a few hours if you can wait.
Power it on and check the speakers
Once it is properly dry, turn it on. If it boots and the only thing wrong is that the sound is muffled, you have got off lightly: that is water in the speaker cavity, which sits outside the sealed part of the phone, and a low-frequency cycle clears it in about two minutes.
What not to do, and why
- Rice
- The most repeated bad advice in consumer electronics. Rice is a mediocre desiccant that pulls moisture out of the air slowly — slower than a dry room with air moving through it. Meanwhile it sheds starch dust into the ports and grilles you have just spent ten minutes clearing. Apple explicitly advises against it.
- A hairdryer, radiator or direct sun
- Heat drives moisture inward and deeper rather than out, softens the adhesive holding the display and the water seals, and is comfortably capable of stressing the battery. A wet phone in a hot car is a worse position than a wet phone.
- Compressed air
- Pushes water further in, which is the exact opposite of the goal, and can force it past seals it had not passed yet. Gravity and gentle tapping do the same job in the right direction.
- Turning it on to see if it works
- The temptation is enormous and the cost is real. Every minute powered up while wet is a minute of current across contacts that should not be bridged. Whatever you learn by switching it on early, you could have learned three hours later with the phone in better shape.
- Shaking it hard
- Gentle taps with the openings pointing down, yes. Vigorous shaking flings water sideways into places it had not reached and into the earpiece from the inside.
Water resistance is not waterproofing
Your phone may well be rated IP68, and that rating is real. It is also a laboratory measurement taken on a new device in still fresh water, and it is explicitly not a warranty against liquid damage on any major manufacturer’s terms. Seals age. A phone that has been dropped has a slightly different geometry than one that has not. Pressure — a dive, a jet, a washing machine — is a completely different test from immersion.
Which is not a reason to panic, only a reason to follow the steps rather than assume the rating did the work for you. What IP67 and IP68 actually mean goes through the numbers properly.
When the speaker is the only casualty
This is the common outcome, and it is the good one. The phone works, the screen is fine, everything is normal except that audio sounds like it is coming through a pillow. That is water sitting in front of the speaker membrane, and it is the easiest possible thing to fix.
The fix is a low tone at full volume with the speaker facing down, run twice, wiping between cycles. CleanWave does it as one button, adds vibration alongside the tone, and lets you check the top and bottom speakers separately afterwards — which matters, because it is very common to clear one and not notice the other is still blocked.
Signs it needs a repair rather than a cycle
- It will not charge, or the liquid-detection warning persists for more than a day after the phone is dry.
- The screen shows discolouration, blotches, or lines that were not there before.
- It gets warm doing nothing, or the battery drains far faster than normal.
- The speaker crackles or buzzes rather than sounding quiet — that is a damaged or corroded driver, and no tone fixes it. Blocked or broken has the test.
- It worked, and then a few days later it stopped. This is the classic signature of corrosion from salt water, and it needs a shop.