I swear this happens to everyone at some point in Mexico.
And me being not-special, it happened to my ass too. Here are tips to deal with it intelligently!
Popular ways to get water damage:
- You drop it in a pool or cenote, or heavy rain. Not a great scenario but not the worse.
- Ocean water got into it. OUCH! This is the worst as salt slowly corrodes shit.
- You bought the stupid ass $5 ziplock bags with the neon plastic clamp at the top. These things suck!!!! Also..the plastic clamp breaks easily under force and your phone call fall into the ocean, off the zipline, or whatever adventurous shit you’re doing. Do not trust these cases!
- You bought fancier $10 ziplock bags that has 3 ziplocks wrapped around each other. This thing is better than the $5 one but still sucks. Water still leaks in and you will still get phone damage!
Water damage on a STILL-working phone:
- The moment you realize your phone is water damaged, DO NOT turn it on or try to charge it. Turn that shit off and stop messing with it.
- Take it to a repair shop that has a special phone-dryer machine. That machine can remove the inside moisture.
- If you don’t have a repair shop nearby with drying machine, then leave the phone off for a good 2-3 days hoping the moisture goes away.
- If you keep fucking around with your phone while there’s water inside, the water can eventually short-circuit and kill your phone (along with the data in it). DO NOT FUCK AROUND!
- If the charge-port doesn’t work, stop trying to charge it. Take it to a repair shop to replace the port (only costs $25) or you can use a wireless charger.
Water damage on a NON-working phone:
- In my opinion, it’s better that you have a phone that doesn’t turn on, then
- Take it to a shop and have them diagnose it on the spot.
- If the phone doesn’t turn on at all, it can be short-circuited battery or motherboard or screen. Or if you’re lucky the phone simply ran out of battery and it’s only the chargeport that doesn’t work.
- Obviously a battery and chargeport is easy to exchange with many parts available. A damaged motherboard or screen is a real hassle because parts are not available (require 5-8 business days to order) and may come with other complications…such as your Face ID no longer works or your data may be lost (don’t cry yet, give me a chance).
- Instead of ordering expensive parts and waiting for days, I recommend you immediately look on Facebook marketplace for used or likely stolen phones (pricing is usually cheap). Find one that matches your model and buy it and bring to the repair shop to use as donor parts. This is the only way to ensure you get an OEM factory-quality Apple screen. Do not trust them to use a 3rd-party “replacement” screen (regardless of what they say) while taking your authentic screen (you broken authentic one is still worth at lot of money).
- When replacing screen and/or motherboard, your Face ID might not work anymore and warranty could be void (especially if you repair from non-Apple shop). Only thing you can do at this point is to sell your phone and buy a new one. Iphones are really expensive in Mexico, so your used non-perfect phone is still worth a lot to sell to locals. You can buy a new one back at home and recover the same data off the cloud backup.
- After swapping parts and repairing the phone, the technician may still tell you that the phone doesn’t boot/function properly and the only option is to REFORMAT the data. At this point, you still have one more option. I recommend sending your phone immediately to Aaron Harrington of iBoard Data Recovery. This dude is clearly one of the best in the world at saving data off iPhones (see his YouTube videos). Do not waste your time with anybody else (many are scammers) or programs that claim to recover data off your iPhone (trust me, they aren’t able to if your phone doesn’t even boot up…they only search through backups on cloud or your local computer). But still….he can’t recover your data once you’ve chosen to reformat your phone (NO ONE can).
- German recovery company – also top world level guy RESQ
- Aus recovery company – Esperanto Group, not sure if they’re A-level but the owner will give you an honest diagnosis!
- At this point, or even before, I highly recommend buying another phone to use in the meanwhile. So that you can relax and think straight to make the best decisions for your main phone. A lot of times, people panic and then make the wrong decision to reformat their phone which causes irreversible loss of all information (photos/videos) on that phone.
What did we learn?
- Turn your phone off as soon as you know water is inside.
- Back your phone up often to the cloud, or airdrop latest photos to your laptop before you go out.
- Instead of waiting for expensive replacement parts, buy a used phone for donor parts.
- Send your phone to iBoard Data Recovery if you want your data, already exhausted other options, and didn’t reformat your phone already.