Test videos on YouTube that promise to remove water from your phone

Every day for the past four years, dozens of people have appeared in the comments of a certain YouTube video, expressing their love and admiration for the content. The content: two minutes and six seconds of a deep, slow buzz, the kind of buzz that makes your phone vibrate on a table, underscoring the vaguely odd animation of curved colored glass.

It's not a good video. But that doesn't mean it is. The video is called “Sound to get water out of phone speaker (guaranteed).” There are many other videos like it. And the comments — “community,” as many call it — are almost all from people who got their phones wet in some way or another. “Crossed the river with phone in pocket,” said one recently. “Yeah, the steam from the shower is why I'm here,” said another. “I was using my phone in the shower, it's a life saver.” They keep saying things like this, many of them from repeat offenders. “We're back again for the third time this month.” “It's been 3 weeks and I'm back again.” “I dropped my poop in the shower again!”

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

If you believe the comments, about half of the video's 45 million views are from people taking their phone into the shower or bathtub and trusting that they can play the video and everything will be fine. I encountered this firsthand earlier this year when my nephew's phone fell out of his pocket into a river near our Airbnb in a small town in Virginia. We semi-miraculously found his phone, then brought him inside and tried to dry it out. A moment later, one of his friends casually suggested playing “one of those videos that expels water.” We put “sound (guaranteed) to expel water from the phone's speaker,”

Since then, I’ve been trying to figure out if these videos actually work. Are all these lucky shower scrollers just the beneficiaries of phones that have gotten far more waterproof and rugged in recent years? Or should we stop recommending rice and just recommend “Sound to get water out of phone speakers (guaranteed)”?

First I asked phone manufacturers what they thought. None of Apple, Google or Samsung gave much of an interesting answer other than pointing to the usual “what to do if your phone gets wet” support page, but the two people I spoke to said they thought the theory was pretty plausible.

The theory goes something like this: The speaker actually just pushes air around, and if you can set it to push enough air around with enough force, you might be able to push liquid droplets out of where they came from. “The lowest sound that the speaker can produce is played at the loudest level it can,” says Eric Freeman, a senior director of research at Bose. “That will create the most air movement, which will push the water trapped inside the phone.” Generally, the bigger the speaker, the louder and lower the sound it can make. Phone speakers are typically small. “So those YouTube videos,” Freeman says, “it's not really very deep bass. But it's in that low range of where a phone is capable of making sound.”

The best real-world example of how this could work is probably the Apple Watch, which has a dedicated feature to expel water after you get it wet. When I first asked iFixit about its water-expulsion secret, Karsten Fraunheim, a repairability engineer at the company, said the watch works on the same principle as the video. “It's just a specific oscillating tone that expels water from the speaker grill,” he said. “Don't know how effective the third-party versions are for phones as they're probably not tuned ideally. We can test.”

The company actually did the testing. Shahram Mokhtari, iFixit's lead teardown engineer, and Chetan Ritter, an engineering student who works in iFixit's editorial department, took four phones and got them wet. We took an iPhone 13, a Pixel 7 Pro, a Pixel 3, and a Nokia 7.1, all chosen not scientifically but because these were devices I had and was willing to destroy in the name of science. Each phone went into the UV bath for about a minute, after which Ritter pulled it out, tapped it to remove some water, played a water removal video, and left it overnight. The next day, he checked to see if there was any residue of the UV dye, a sign that liquid had gone in and not come out.

The results varied all over the place. The Pixel 7 Pro was completely 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: Over time, a phone's seal can change or be inadvertently broken. Both he and Ritter stressed that no matter what your phone manufacturer advertises or what you've experienced before, there's always a risk of your phone getting wet. And that risk increases over time.

However, judging by the YouTube video's role, the evidence was pretty clear. It works! A little bit. While he played the video on each phone, Ritter also took a close-up video of the speaker on each phone, and in every case, the phone immediately shrugged off the drops. The effect didn't last long, but it was clearly expelling water that wasn't otherwise coming out.

The videos weren't a complete solution to the problem, however. The 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 under the buttons, USB port, or SIM card slot, which were the other most common intrusion spots. And if it doesn't expel the liquid on that first try, Ritter found that it mostly just moves the droplets back and forth when the speaker moves. So, he says, “I'd say [the videos] It's kind of a chore. It doesn't do any harm, but I don't think it's a last resort or a way to get all the fluid out.”

This is probably why companies like Apple and Samsung don't offer water ejection in their phones, while they do offer it in their smartwatches. “Watches have fewer holes and openings than phones, which allows them to be designed to let water out of those openings,” says Mokhtari. “In phones, the speakers are located at the bottom and top of the phone, which means you can't reach openings like the SIM card slot. It's not possible to drain water out of those openings.”

The good news for shower scrollers is that phones are actually getting more waterproof: Three of the four phones Ritter tested still worked fine, and the newest of them, the Pixel 7 Pro, didn't get any liquid at all. The bad news is that there's no guarantee they'll always be waterproof. 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 else is in shampoo,” Ritter says, “but it's probably more conductive — it's very rare that you get absolutely fresh water inside your iPhone.”

So, sure, bookmark the water removal video and load it up in case of an emergency. Join the “Sound to Remove Water From Phone Speaker (Guaranteed)” community, where everyone hopes to save each other’s devices. But don’t count on it too much. Everyone I talked to gave the same advice: just keep your phone out of the shower.