Don't put your drowned phone into rice to dry it
ifixit.com
ifixit.com
If only our devices were user-friendly instead of planned obsolescent.
If you drown your iPhone XS, you just wipe it off. Removable batteries mean openings, which means intrusion opportunities.
A battery door is a giant potential ingress point for water.
Commenters: Yes but I put my phone in rice once and it worked, so...
I should note I left the phone in the rice for a few days, and it still didn't work. So I bought a new phone and forgot about it for a few months. Low and behold, when I did remember it months later, it worked, and did for a year or so more.
Correlation is not causation. You left your phone in rice, but it didn’t work. It didn’t do anything. The water dried just like it would in any setting. And you where lucky to not get any damage from the corrosion.
The trick to cleaning dry pancake batter is to soak the area with water for a few minutes. It'll revert back into a more batter-like texture and will easily wipe off.
I put the device (in my case it was an mp3 player that I ran with in a rainstorm) in a sealed container with the stuff. I left it in there for a few days and it did the job and it worked for about a year afterwards. It still does "work" but the screen is always blank now, so who knows, maybe the corrosion got to it in the end...
>What you want to do is first displace the water—or more specifically, all the conductive stuff in the water. You can do this best by using 90%+ isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol and a toothbrush. Open your device as soon as you can, take out the battery, and get scrubbing. Submerge the whole motherboard in alcohol, and scrub away. Only then, dry it and see where you stand. By getting the liquid displaced before it can dry, we are cleaning the pancake batter on Sunday morning. This is your best strategy for liquid damage.
I'm not sure that "Instead of putting your phone in rice, open it up, douse it in 90%+ isopropyl and brush it with a toothbrush to remove the water before it dries" is short enough to be an effective title.
And "To fix a drowned phone, drown it again in isopropyl" is arguably even more click-baity.
In further defense, the comments here show the necessity of a title like this. If the title were "how to fix a drowned phone," many people would say "oh, I know this one, just put it in rice" and ignore the article.
Thumbnail is a picture of a guy in SCUBA gear holding a phone and looking shocked. The phone is circled in red for some reason.
The iFixit article advocates displacing the water using rubbing alcohol (i.e. open it up and dunk the motherboard/etc. in alcohol) - thus halting the corrosion that would continue if it were left to dry.