Testing YouTube Videos That Promise To Get Water Out Of Your Phone

For the past four years, every day, dozens of people have commented on a particular YouTube video, declaring their love and appreciation for its content. The content: two minutes and six seconds of deep, low-pitched hum, the kind that would make your phone vibrate on the table, underscoring a vaguely trippy animation of swirling stained glass windows.

This isn’t a good video. But that’s not what it’s supposed to be. The video is called “Sound To Remove Water From Phone Speaker (GUARANTEED).” There are plenty more like it, too. And the comments—“the community,” as many call it—are almost all from people who have simply gotten their phones wet in some way. “I walked across a river with my phone in my pocket,” says one recent one. “Yeah, the steam from the shower is why I’m here,” says another. “I was using my phone in the shower, it’s a lifesaver.” They go on and on, many of them from repeat offenders. “Here we go again for the third time this month.” “It’s been 3 weeks and I’m back.” “I dropped my shit in the shower again!”

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

According to the comments, about half of the video’s 45 million views come from people taking their phones into the shower or bathtub and thinking they can just play this video and everything will be fine. I first encountered this problem 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 miraculously found his phone, then brought it inside and started trying to dry it out. A moment later, one of his friends simply suggested playing “one of those videos that gets the water out.” We put on “Sound to get water out of 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 those lucky people parading in the shower simply the beneficiaries of phones that have become much 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 about it. No one at Apple, Google, or Samsung offered a more interesting answer than to link to a generic “what to do if your phone gets wet” support page, but a few other people I spoke to indicated that they thought the theory sounded pretty reasonable.

The theory is this: All a speaker really does is push air around it, and if you can get enough air to push through it, with enough force, you might be able to force the liquid droplets out of the way they came from. “The lowest sound that speaker can reproduce, the loudest it can play,” says Eric Freeman, senior director of research at Bose. “That’s going to create the most air movement, which is going to push on the water trapped inside the phone.” Generally, the bigger the speaker, the louder it can go up and down. Phone speakers tend to be tinny. “So these YouTube videos,” Freeman says, “are not really deep bass. But they’re in the low end of where a phone is capable of producing sound.”

The best real-world example of this is probably the Apple Watch, which has a dedicated feature to eject water after it gets wet. When I first contacted iFixit to ask them to explain my water-ejection mystery, Carsten Frauenheim, a repairability engineer at the company, told me that the Watch works on the same theory as the videos. “It’s just a specific oscillating sound that pushes water out of the speaker grilles,” he said. “I’m not sure how effective third-party versions for phones are, because they’re probably not perfectly tuned? We could test that.”

The company did indeed run some tests. Shahram Mokhtari, iFixit’s lead teardown engineer, and Chayton Ritter, an engineering student who also works with iFixit’s editorial team, took four phones and got them wet. We chose an iPhone 13, a Pixel 7 Pro, a Pixel 3, and a Nokia 7.1, all chosen not for scientific reasons but because they were the devices I had on hand and was willing to destroy in the name of science. Each phone was submerged in 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 if there was any UV dye residue left, a sign that liquid had gotten in and not come out.

The results were wildly different. The Pixel 7 Pro was nearly dry, the Nokia 7.1 was more or less ruined, and the iPhone 13 and Pixel 3 fell somewhere in between. But these tests aren’t perfectly controlled, Mokhtari was careful to note: A phone’s waterproofing can change over time or be broken imperceptibly. Both he and Ritter were emphatic that no matter what your phone maker advertises or what you’ve experienced before, there’s always a risk of getting your phone wet. And it gets riskier over time.

As for the role of the YouTube video, however, the evidence was pretty clear. It works! Kind of. While he was streaming the video to each phone, Ritter also filmed a close-up of each phone’s speaker, and in every case, the phone immediately shot out a burst of droplets. The effect didn’t last long, but it was clearly ejecting water that wouldn’t otherwise come out.

The videos don’t completely solve the problem, though. A smartphone’s speaker seems to be powerful enough to expel air right next to the speaker, but not to fix problems elsewhere in the device, particularly under the buttons, USB port, or SIM card reader, which are the other most common points of intrusion. And if the liquid doesn’t come out in the first burst, Ritter found that it just squirts the droplets back and forth as the speaker moves. “So I think[the videos]work pretty well. It can’t hurt, but I don’t think it’s a silver bullet or a way to get all the liquid out,” he says.

Perhaps this is why companies like Apple and Samsung don’t offer water-repellent features on their phones, but they do on their smartwatches. “There are fewer cavities and holes in watches than phones, which allows them to design devices that evacuate water from those cavities,” Mokhtari says. “On the phone, the speakers are located at the bottom and the top, which means you can’t access cavities like the SIM card slot. It’s just not possible to evacuate water from those cavities.”

The good news for shower lovers is that phones are becoming more water-resistant: Three of the four phones Ritter tested still worked properly, and the newest of them, the Pixel 7 Pro, showed no residual liquid. The bad news is that there’s no guarantee they’ll stay water-resistant forever. And the really bad news is that if you shower 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 to have what amounts to perfectly cool water inside your iPhone.”

So, sure, bookmark a water-expelling video and download it in case of an emergency. Join the “Sound to Remove Water from Phone Speaker (GUARANTEED)” community, where everyone seems to be cheering for the survival of each other’s devices. But don’t trust it too much. Everyone I spoke to ended up giving you the same advice: just keep your phone out of the shower.