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We've all been there. One moment your phone's in your hand, the next it's at the bottom of the sink. Or the toilet. Or you've been caught in a proper downpour and forgotten it was in your back pocket.
That sick feeling in your stomach is completely understandable — but what you do in the next few minutes genuinely matters more than you'd think. We see water damaged phones at iMobile every single day, and honestly? Most of the damage we can't fix isn't from the water itself. It's from what people did afterwards.
This one gets passed around like gospel, and we completely understand why — it sounds logical. Rice absorbs moisture, right? So it'll absorb the moisture from inside your phone.
It won't, though. Not really. Rice can't reach the components that matter, and it certainly can't pull moisture off a circuit board that's already been exposed. What it can do is leave behind dust, starch, and tiny grains that work their way into your ports and make a technician's job a good deal harder.
We get it — the first thing anyone wants to do is check whether it's actually broken. But plugging a wet phone into a charger is one of the quickest ways to turn a fixable problem into a permanently dead one.
Water and electricity don't mix. If there's any moisture still on the board when power runs through it, you can short-circuit the whole thing in seconds. What might have been a straightforward clean-up job suddenly becomes a full motherboard repair — or worse, it can't be saved at all.
Again, completely understandable. You want to know if it's responsive. But every button press, every swipe, every attempt to unlock the screen pushes water further into the device — past seals, past protective layers, deeper into components that were previously dry.
It's a bit like having a leak in your roof and poking at the wet patch. You're not helping — you're spreading the problem.
Or putting it on the radiator. Or leaving it on the windowsill in direct sunlight. Heat feels like it should help — you're drying it out, after all.
The problem is that the inside of your phone is not designed to handle that kind of warmth. High temperatures warp components, melt adhesive seals, and can cause the battery to swell or fail entirely. You're also pushing moisture around with the air pressure rather than removing it. A hairdryer is probably the single fastest way to make things significantly worse.
This is probably the most costly mistake of the lot, and it's easy to make because sometimes a water damaged phone will seem absolutely fine at first. It turns on, everything works, you think you've got away with it.
But corrosion starts within hours of water exposure. Even if your phone appears to be working normally, moisture on the board is already beginning to cause damage — slowly spreading, slowly eating away at connections. A phone that seems fine on Tuesday can fail completely by Thursday.
The phones we can't save are almost always the ones that were left for days before anyone brought them in. The ones we fix easily are the ones that came to us the same day.
Here's the short version:
That's genuinely it. You don't need rice, you don't need a hairdryer, you don't need to wait and see. You just need a technician who knows what they're doing.
When you bring a water damaged phone to any of our stores, here's what actually happens:
We carry out repairs on iPhone, Samsung, iPad, Google Pixel, Huawei and most other major devices.
Most repairs done in 30–60 minutes, while you wait. No appointment needed.
