Having an iPhone with a damaged speaker can be a serious letdown. Luckily, before taking the phone to the Apple Store or selling the device at a lower price, you can try this tip: take a Q-tip (also known as cotton buds or cotton swabs) and swivel it inside of the headphone jack of your iPhone. This will bring the sound back on your iPhones.
There’s plenty of evidence that using Q-tip can fix your iPhone’s speaker problem, although sometimes it may require several tries. For instance, Mark from BoingBoing used Q-tip five to six times to fix his daughter’s iPhone. Be careful though, you don’t want the Q-tip to be stuck in your iPhone’s headphone jack — that’s a rare case!
One can also use this tip to fix iPod Touches and iPads speaker.
No cotton buds? Not to worry…
Any material that is safe to use, and has the ability to attract dusty particles, can be used to clean the headphone jack. If you don’t have a Q-tip at home, you can wrap a piece of tape around a paperclip. The video below explains how easy it is to clean your iPhone’s headphone jack using the paperclip method:
One can also use a toothpick to nudge the headphone jack of their iPhones — Mac users were able to bring the sound back using this trick, so it’s worth a shot.
If there’s water in your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, then read this article to save a wet iOS device using rice or silica packers.
