Tom's Guide

YouTube videos really can get water out of your phone — here's how

By Dave LeClair,

7 hours ago

Getting water inside your smartphone is never a good thing. Sure, most modern phones have a high water ingress resistance , but that doesn't mean you're immune to the dangers of moisture.

Some viral YouTube videos claim they can use vibration to remove water from a phone, which sounds ridiculous. However, The Verge decided to test the videos to see if they deliver on their promise, and it turns out some do.

The most popular video is titled " Sound To Remove Water From Phone Speaker ( GUARANTEED ) ," and it appears to do exactly what it promises. Users from all over commented on the video, saying what brought them to it, and most of them seemed to have left happy with the results. "Just dropped a glass of water on my phone. I'm so glad to come back to this wonderful community. August 2024 anyone?" reads a recent comment.

As of this writing, it has 45 million views, which is a lot of wet phones. The video first appeared on YouTube four years ago, so it's still relatively young in the grand scheme of the video-sharing service.

The Verge decided to contact the makers of the best phones to see if they had any comments on the videos, but they simply pointed the publication to generic support pages about dealing with wet phones. So, it turned to iFixit to test the videos and see if water was ejected from the phone.

iFixit's lead teardown engineer, Shahram Mokhtari, and an engineering student from the company's editorial department named Chayton Ritter took four phones and soaked them. They used a mix of newer and older phones — an iPhone 13 , a Pixel 7 Pro , a Pixel 3, and a Nokia 7.1 — to perform the test.

The findings were interesting because they seemed to vary based on the phone. The Pixel 7 Pro came out completely dry after being submerged for a minute and left out overnight with the video playing. On the other hand, the Nokia 7.1 was basically ruined. The iPhone 13 and Pixel 3 were somewhere in between.

The team at iFixit noted that this test is slightly flawed. The phones' seals could break as they age, thus resulting in one taking on more water than it would have when it was new.

Overall, the test deemed that YouTube videos ejected water. As soon as they played the YouTube video, the testers captured droplets shooing out of the phone in a close-up video, demonstrating that water is definitely moving. However, areas outside the speaker ports weren't as good as drying since the speaker was pushing the air out of the phone, which was moving the water.

In the end, iFixIt's Ritter said 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."

YouTube videos really can get water out of your phone — here's how

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