Don’t dry your wet iPhone in a bag of rice, Apple warns – do this instead

Rice does more harm than good, says Apple

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If you’ve dropped youriPhonein water and need to dry it out, plenty of people will give you a simple piece of advice: put it in a sealed bag of rice. The idea is the rice will draw out the moisture and allow your device to dry. The problem? It probably doesn’t work,according to experts, and nowApplehas joined the fray by warning users not to do it.

In asupport documentspotted byMacworld, Apple’s advice is simple: “Don’t put your iPhone in a bag of rice.” The reason? “Doing so could allow small particles of rice to damage your iPhone.” As rice absorbs water, it quickly becomes gummy, which could stick inside your phone. It may also attract dust, causing further problems, and in any case, it doesn’t act quickly enough to prevent corrosion.

It’s not the only method that Apple says is best avoided. The company also advises that you should not “dry your iPhone using an external heat source or compressed air,” nor should you “insert a foreign object, such as a cotton swab or a paper towel, into the connector.” At best, these methods will do nothing to help. At worst, they could damage your iPhone.

Of course, you won’t want to do nothing at all if your iPhone is wet. For one thing, attempting to charge it while there’s moisture in the charging port will lead to an on-screen warning in iOS – pressing ahead and charging anyway could corrode the pins in your phone’s connector or on the charging cable, leading to permanent damage to one or both.

How to dry your iPhone, according to Apple

OK, so what should you do instead of using rice, compressed air, or one of the other methods Apple disapproves of? According to the company’s support document, there’s a specific set of steps you should take:

With any luck, this process should help if you get a warning on your iPhone saying that liquid has been detected in its charging connector. If not, it might be time to get anew phone. But one thing is for sure: instead of employing rice to dry out your device, stick to using it at mealtimes instead.

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Alex Blake has been fooling around with computers since the early 1990s, and since that time he’s learned a thing or two about tech. No more than two things, though. That’s all his brain can hold. As well as TechRadar, Alex writes for iMore, Digital Trends and Creative Bloq, among others. He was previously commissioning editor at MacFormat magazine. That means he mostly covers the world of Apple and its latest products, but also Windows, computer peripherals, mobile apps, and much more beyond. When not writing, you can find him hiking the English countryside and gaming on his PC.

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