Testing YouTube videos that promise to get water out of your phone

Over the past four years, dozens of people have been popping up in the comments on a particular YouTube video, declaring their love and appreciation for the content. The content: two minutes and six seconds of deep, low vibration, the kind that makes your phone vibrate on a table, emphasizing the mysterious animation of the colorful stained glass.

It’s not a good video, but it’s not supposed to be. The video’s title is “Sound to remove water from the phone speaker (guaranteed)“There are many others like him, too. The comments — the “community,” as many refer to it — are mostly from people who have gotten their phones wet in some way. “I walked through a river with my phone in my pocket,” one person says recently. “Yes, the steam from the shower is why I’m here. I was using my phone in the shower, and it’s a lifesaver.” And they go on and on, many of them repeat offenders. “We’re back for the third time this month.” “It’s been 3 weeks and I’m back again.” “I pooped in the shower again!”

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

If you believe the comments, about half of the video’s 45 million views come from people who bring their phones into the shower or bathtub and trust that they can play this video and everything will be fine. I first encountered this earlier this year after my nephew’s phone slipped out of his pocket and into a river near our Airbnb in a small town in Virginia. We miraculously found his phone, brought it inside, and started trying to dry it off. After a moment, a friend casually suggested playing “one of those water-removing videos.” We played “Water-removing sound from phone speaker (guaranteed),” and eventually, the phone was fine.

Since then, I’ve been trying to figure out if these videos actually work. Are all of those lucky people who use their phone in the shower just the beneficiaries of phones that have become more water-resistant and durable in recent years? Or should we stop recommending rice and start recommending “voice to remove water from phone speaker (guaranteed)”?

The first thing I did was ask the phone manufacturers for their opinion. No one at Apple, Google, or Samsung offered an answer more interesting than pointing to a generic support page on “what to do if your phone gets wet,” but a couple of other people I spoke to said they thought the theory sounded plausible enough.

The theory goes like this: All a speaker is really doing is pushing air around, and if you can push enough air around, and with enough force, you might be able to push the liquid droplets back where they came from. “The lowest tone a speaker can reproduce, the loudest it can play,” says Eric Freeman, senior research director at Bose. “That’s going to create the most air movement, which is going to push the water trapped inside the phone.” In general, the bigger the speaker, the more it can go up and down. Phone speakers tend to be small. “So YouTube videos, they don’t have really deep bass,” Freeman says. “But it’s in the low range where a phone can make sound.”

Perhaps the best real-world example of how this works is the Apple Watch, which has a dedicated feature to eject water after it gets wet. When I first reached out to iFixit to ask about the water-repelling mystery, Karsten Fraunheim, the company’s repairability engineer, said the watch works on the same theory as the videos. “It’s just a specific vibration tone that pushes water out of the speaker grilles,” he said. “I’m not sure how effective the external versions of phones are since they’re probably not perfectly tuned? We can test that.”

In fact, the company ran tests. Shahram Mokhtari, iFixit’s lead teardown engineer, and Chaiton Ritter, an engineering student who also works with iFixit’s editorial team, took four phones and wet them. We chose the iPhone 13, Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 3, and Nokia 7.1, all chosen not for scientific reasons but because they were devices I had on hand and was willing to destroy in the name of science. Each phone was placed in a UV bath for about a minute, after which Ritter took it out, tapped it to dislodge some of the water, played one of his water-expulsion videos, and left it overnight. The next day, he checked to see where there was still a remnant of the UV dye, indicating that the liquid had gotten in and not come out.

The results were mixed. The Pixel 7 Pro was completely dry, the Nokia 7.1 was fairly devastating, and the iPhone 13 and Pixel 3 were somewhere in between. But these aren’t perfectly controlled tests, and Mokhtari was careful to note that a phone’s seal can change over time or break in subtle ways. He and Ritter said flatly that no matter what your phone manufacturer says or what you’ve been through before, it’s always dangerous to get your phone wet. And it gets more dangerous over time.

But as for the YouTube video’s role, the evidence was fairly clear. It worked! Sort of. As Ritter played the video on each phone, he also took a close-up video of the speaker on each phone, and in each case, the phone immediately erupted in a shower of water droplets. The effect was short-lived, but it was clear that water was coming out of the phone that it otherwise wouldn’t have.

But the videos weren’t a complete solution to the problem. The smartphone’s speaker seemed to be powerful enough to push air out from right next to the speaker, but not to solve problems elsewhere on the device — particularly under the buttons, USB port, or SIM card slot, which were the most common places to be hacked. And if the liquid didn’t come out in that first push, Ritter found that it was mostly just splashing back and forth as the speaker moved. So, he says, “I say, [the videos] “This kind of work doesn’t hurt, but I don’t see it as a final solution or a way to get all the fluid out.”

This may be why companies like Apple and Samsung don’t offer water repellent in their phones when they do in their smartwatches. “There are fewer holes and cavities in watches than phones, which allows them to be designed to push water out of these cavities,” says Mokhtari. “In a phone, the speakers are on the bottom and top of the phone, which means you can’t reach cavities like the SIM card slot. It’s simply not possible to push water out of these cavities.”

The good news for shower users is that phones are becoming more water-resistant: Three of the four phones Ritter tested still worked fine, and the latest, the Pixel 7 Pro, didn’t have any liquid left in it at all. The bad news is that there’s no guarantee that 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 else is in shampoo, but it’s probably more conductive—you rarely get the equivalent of pure water inside your iPhone,” Ritter says.

So, make sure you save a video of the water flushing, and upload that clip in case of emergency. Join the “Sound to Remove Water from Phone Speaker (Guaranteed)” community, where everyone seems to be encouraging each other to keep their devices. But don’t trust this community too much. Everyone I talked to ended up giving the same advice: Just keep your phone out of the bathroom.