Water eject sound

Get water out of a phone speaker in three steps

1. Open this page on the wet phone itself, turn the volume all the way up, and hold the phone with the speaker pointing at the floor.
2. Choose how long to play, 30 seconds to 2 minutes, and press Play. The tone pulses so the speaker pushes and settles over and over.
3. When the countdown ends, wipe the speaker grill and play some audio. If it still sounds muffled, run it again or let the phone dry for a few hours.

How a sound pushes water out

A speaker makes sound by moving a thin cone or membrane back and forth. When droplets sit in the mesh in front of it, they muffle the sound and buzz. A loud low tone makes the membrane move as far as it can, and those strong pushes shake the droplets loose so gravity can pull them out of the grill. This page plays a 165 Hz sine wave, a pitch low enough to move a lot of air in a small phone speaker but high enough for that speaker to reproduce. The tone pulses on for about half a second and off for a fifth of a second, so the membrane keeps starting and stopping instead of settling into one steady motion. After the pulses you can add a slow sweep from 100 to 300 Hz, which shakes the mesh at several frequencies in case one of them suits your speaker better.

The same idea Apple uses

The Water Lock feature on Apple Watch ends by playing a series of tones to push water out of the speaker, and the popular iPhone Water Eject shortcut plays a similar low tone. This page does the same thing in the browser, so it works on Android phones, iPhones, tablets, and laptops without installing anything. Because it is a web page, it uses whatever volume your device allows. Phone speakers vary, so you may notice that one pitch buzzes the grill more than another; that is normal.

What it cannot fix

A tone only helps with water sitting in the speaker opening and the mesh in front of it. It cannot remove water that got inside the phone, dry a wet charging port, or repair a speaker that was already damaged. If your phone went into a pool, the sea, or a toilet, switch it off, do not charge it, and let it dry. Salt water and drinks leave residue that a sound will not clean. If the speaker still sounds distorted after a day of drying and a few runs here, the speaker itself may be damaged and needs a repair shop. No sound can guarantee a fix, whatever other videos promise.

Tips for the best result

Remove the case so it does not cover the speaker. Face the speaker down, not up, so the droplets fall out instead of back in. Run the sound for one minute, wipe the grill, then test with music. Earpiece speakers at the top of a phone are quieter, so hold the top of the phone down for those. On a laptop, tilt it so the speaker grilles face down. If the loud tone is unpleasant, step away; the phone does the work. You can also download the sound as a WAV file and play it from a music app with the screen off.