A YouTube video claiming it can remove water from your iPhone may be on par with emails from Nigerian princes and videos of Elon Musk promoting a new cryptocurrency, but tests show that it actually works… sort of.

A tech journalist, understandably skeptical of the comments on the video, decided to turn on iFixit to put the claim to the test…

The two-minute video titled Sound to remove water from phone speaker (GUARANTEED)was viewed around 45 million times over the course of four years.

It has also garnered over 140,000 comments, many of whom claim they tried it and it worked.

The Verge website David Pierce tried it and it seemed to work, but wondered if it was just a coincidence.

I first experienced it earlier this year when my nephew’s phone slipped out of his pocket and into a river near our Airbnb in a small town in Virginia. Miraculously, we found his phone, brought it inside, and tried to dry it off. A moment later, one of his friends casually suggested we “play one of those videos that get the water out.” We put on “Sound to remove water from phone speaker (GUARANTEED)” and eventually the phone was fine.

Since then, I’ve been trying to figure out if these videos really work. Are all these happy shower scrollers just the beneficiaries of phones that have become much more waterproof and rugged in recent years? Or should we stop recommending rice and recommend this video instead?

Apple declined to comment, even though the Apple Watch’s water ejection system works in exactly the same way. Audio maker Bose said the theory was, er, reasonable enough.

A speaker really just displaces air, and if you can get it to displace enough air with enough force, you might be able to push liquid droplets out of the air. “The lowest note the speaker can play, at the highest volume it can play,” says Eric Freeman, senior research director at Bose. “That creates the greatest air movement that displaces the water trapped in the phone.”

Generally speaking, the bigger the speaker, the louder and deeper it can sound. Phone speakers are usually tiny. “In these YouTube videos,” says Freeman, “the bass isn’t really deep. But it’s in the lower range that a phone can produce sound.”

iFixit tested the video with four phones, including an iPhone 13, and it worked – sort of.

It works! A little bit. While playing the video on each phone, Ritter also took close-ups of the speaker on each phone, and in each case the phone immediately shot out a gush of drops. The effect didn’t last long, but it was clearly expelling water that wouldn’t have come out otherwise.

However, as expected, the benefit is limited to the speakers. If there is water in the USB port, the SIM slot or under the buttons, the video will not help.

Photo by zhang kaiyv on Unsplash