The Uncomfortable Truth About Phone Waterproofing

Your phone has an IP68 rating. The box said water resistant. The advert showed someone taking photos in the rain. So when it stops working after a swim, you assume the warranty covers it. It doesn’t.

We know this because we see it every week. At Fixfactor, we’ve completed over 220,000 device repairs across 11 years in London. A significant proportion of our liquid damage cases involve phones that were marketed as water resistant. These aren’t cheap budget handsets — they’re flagship iPhones, Samsung Galaxy S-series, and Google Pixels. Devices that cost £800 to £1,200 new.

This article explains what IP68 actually means, why your phone’s water resistance degrades over time, why no manufacturer covers liquid damage under warranty despite their marketing, and what you should actually do if your phone gets wet.

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What IP68 Actually Means — and What It Doesn’t

IP stands for Ingress Protection. The first digit (6) rates dust resistance. The second digit (8) rates water resistance. An IP68 rating means:

• 6 — Dust-tight. No ingress of dust. Good.
• 8 — Protected against submersion beyond 1 metre. Typically tested at 1.5 metres for 30 minutes in freshwater, at room temperature, with a brand new device.

That last part matters enormously. The IP68 test is conducted under controlled laboratory conditions: still, clean, fresh water at a stable temperature, on a device that has never been dropped, never been opened, never been exposed to temperature cycling, and has factory-fresh adhesive seals.

Your real life looks nothing like this.

Swimming pools contain chlorine. The sea contains salt. Lakes contain sediment. Bathrooms are full of steam and soap. Hot tubs combine heat, chemicals, and pressure from jets. Every one of these conditions is outside the scope of IP68 testing — and every one of them accelerates seal failure.

How Water Resistance Degrades Over Time

The water resistance in modern phones comes from a combination of adhesive gaskets, rubber seals, and mesh coverings over ports and speaker grilles. These components are designed to resist water ingress — but they are not permanent.

Adhesive seals lose effectiveness over time. The adhesive that bonds your phone’s screen to its frame, and the back glass to the chassis, degrades through normal temperature cycling. Your phone goes from a warm pocket to cold outdoor air and back again, hundreds of times a year. This thermal expansion and contraction weakens adhesive bonds gradually. After 12 to 18 months of daily use, your phone’s water resistance is measurably lower than when it was new.

Drops and impacts compromise seals. Even a minor drop onto concrete can create a micro-gap between the screen and the frame. You might not see it — the phone looks fine — but the seal integrity is gone. The next time that phone encounters moisture, water finds its way in through a gap invisible to the naked eye.

Charging port exposure. Every time you plug in a cable, the charging port’s internal contacts are exposed to air, dust, and pocket lint. Over time, these ports become vulnerable points for moisture ingress, particularly if the phone is charged in a humid environment like a bathroom or kitchen.

Previous repairs affect seals. If your phone has been repaired before — whether by a manufacturer, a third-party repairer, or even through a screen protector application that involved heat — the original factory seal may have been disturbed.

The Marketing vs. The Reality

We remember the Sony Xperia Z1 launch vividly. The marketing campaign featured people taking photographs underwater. The message was clear: this phone works in water. Use it in water.

The Sony Xperia Z1 official marketing material — underwater photography front and centre.

We then spent months repairing exactly those phones for liquid damage.

When we opened them up, we were genuinely surprised at how thin the seals were. The engineering simply didn’t match the marketing claim. And buried in Sony’s terms and conditions, predictably, liquid damage wasn’t covered.

Since then, seal technology and overall phone construction have improved considerably. Modern flagship phones are genuinely more resistant to water than they were a decade ago. But the fundamental problem remains: no manufacturer has improved water resistance enough to actually warrant it. They’ll market it. They won’t guarantee it.

This creates a bizarre situation. Manufacturers compete aggressively on water resistance ratings in advertising — IP67, IP68, IP68 with 6-metre depth ratings — because it sells phones. Consumers see these ratings and reasonably assume their phone can handle water. Then when damage occurs, the manufacturer points to the terms and conditions that explicitly exclude liquid damage from warranty coverage.

Liquid Moisture Indicators: The Hidden Judge Inside Your Phone

Here’s something most people don’t know. Inside your phone, typically near the SIM tray or inside the charging port area, there’s a small sticker called a Liquid Contact Indicator (LCI). When your phone is dry, this indicator is white or silver. When it contacts moisture, it turns pink or red — permanently.

When you take your phone to a manufacturer’s service centre, one of the first things they check is this indicator. If it’s red, the conversation is over. The repair is classified as liquid damage, warranty is voided, and you’re offered an out-of-warranty replacement at a significant cost — often close to the price of a new phone.

What We See in Our Repair Workshop

At Fixfactor, we handle liquid damage cases on a regular basis. The patterns are remarkably consistent.

Why Liquid Damage Hits Independent Repairers Too

There’s an irony in all of this that affects businesses like ours directly.

At Fixfactor, we’re transparent with our customers. When we repair a phone, we communicate clearly that the device cannot be considered water resistant after our repair. Any signs of liquid contact will void our repair warranty. We apply proper sealing during reassembly — adhesive gaskets, correct torque on screws, quality parts — but we are honest that we cannot certify the same level of water resistance as a factory-sealed device.

Here’s where the manufacturer’s misleading marketing creates a problem for us. The phone almost certainly wasn’t water resistant before our repair either. The seals had degraded. The phone had been dropped. It was two years old. But because we were the last people to open the device, any subsequent water damage becomes associated with our repair.

Some customers are reluctant to use independent repair services specifically because of this disclosure. They hear “your phone won’t be waterproof after repair” and perceive it as a downgrade — not realising that their phone’s water resistance was already compromised long before they walked through our door.

The manufacturers benefit from this dynamic. The perception of water resistance makes customers more likely to buy a new phone rather than repair an existing one. And that is, ultimately, the business model: sell you a new device every two to three years.

What Insurance Actually Covers (and Warranty Doesn’t)

If you want genuine protection against liquid damage, the only reliable option is insurance — specifically, an insurance policy that explicitly covers accidental liquid damage.

Standard manufacturer warranties from Apple, Samsung, Google, and others do not cover liquid damage under any circumstances, regardless of the phone’s IP rating. Extended warranties and care plans (like AppleCare+ or Samsung Care+) may cover accidental damage including liquid contact, but these are paid insurance products, not standard warranty provisions.

What To Do If Your Phone Gets Wet

If your phone has been exposed to water — especially salt water, chlorinated pool water, or any liquid other than clean fresh water — here’s what actually helps and what doesn’t.

What professional liquid damage treatment involves: When you bring a liquid-damaged phone to us, we disassemble the device completely, disconnect the battery, and inspect the motherboard under a microscope. We use an ultrasonic cleaning process to remove corrosion and mineral deposits from the board. We then assess each component for damage, replace any that have failed, and test the device thoroughly before reassembly.

Salt water and chlorinated water are significantly more corrosive than fresh water. If your phone has been in the sea or a pool, professional cleaning is strongly recommended even if the phone appears to be working normally — because corrosion will be progressing invisibly.

The Broader Pattern: Marketing Claims vs. Consumer Reality

Phone waterproofing is just one example of a broader pattern in consumer electronics. Manufacturers make engineering claims in marketing materials that technically have supporting data under laboratory conditions — but which create consumer expectations that reality cannot meet.

It’s worth noting what this pattern looks like from the manufacturer’s perspective. Water resistance ratings genuinely represent real engineering investment. IP68 phones are better sealed than phones without any rating. The problem isn’t that the technology doesn’t work — it’s that the marketing implies a level of protection that degrades with normal use, and the warranty terms quietly acknowledge this while the adverts do not.

As consumers, the practical takeaway is straightforward: treat water resistance as splash protection, not submersion protection. Your phone can probably handle rain. It can probably survive a brief accidental splash. But swimming with it, using it in the shower, or leaving it exposed to moisture overnight is a gamble — and the stakes are a £1,000 device and potentially irreplaceable data.

Practical Recommendations

Based on over a decade of repairing liquid-damaged phones, here’s our honest advice:

• Treat your phone as splash-resistant, not waterproof.The IP68 rating on a brand new phone offers reasonable protection against brief, accidental exposure to clean fresh water. That’s it. Plan accordingly.
• Be extra cautious after 12 months.Seal degradation is gradual but real. A phone that survived a poolside splash at six months old may not survive the same exposure at two years old.
• After any water exposure, get it checked.If your phone has been submerged — even briefly — in salt water, pool water, or any liquid other than clean tap water, consider having it professionally inspected. Water can sit inside a phone for days before symptoms appear. By then, corrosion has already done significant damage.
• Back up your data regularly.The most painful liquid damage cases we see aren’t about the phone — they’re about the photos, messages, and files that weren’t backed up. Automatic cloud backup is the single best protection against data loss from any cause, including liquid damage.
• If your phone stops working after water exposure, act fast.A phone brought in for professional cleaning within 24 hours of liquid contact has a significantly higher chance of recovery than one left in a drawer for a week. Time is the critical factor.
• Don’t put it in rice.We cannot stress this enough. It doesn’t help. Bring it to someone who can actually open it up and clean it properly.