Can my iPhone work after water damage?

Sewage is conductive and corrosive, among other considerations. While simple short circuits may or may not resolve, corrosion tends to accumulate over time. Nobody wants hot… sewage, either. Replace the iPhone.

Amalfiluv wrote:

My main concern is being able to retrieve photos and contacts.

There's a chance that just your front screen assembly is damaged. However, from your description, it sounds like Apple's response would be that there's been liquid entry. As such, they simply won't do any repairs and consider the device to be a total loss. They would offer a replacement device at their "other damage" price. They consider backing up to be the responsibility of the user, and will disavow any data that may or may not be retrievable on the device.

You might try finding out if a third-party repair shop can see if it works with a working screen assembly. If not, then it might require more hands-on attempts to determine what the fault is and how it might be repaired. Sometimes the damage is simple, such as open resistors and/or closed capacitors that can be removed or replaced to get it to work. Such repairs after water damage don't tend to last, so if that's done it should be to perform a backup and not to repair the device such that it's suitable for normal, indefinite use.

There's some damage that's severe enough that it might require a donor board. The key is to data recovery is that the processor and the flash memory (and its controller) are intact.

Good luck with it.

Amalfiluv wrote:

What do you mean by sewage? It was clean water and the phone was barely wet?

Unless the phone went into the reservoir tank (if this toilet even has one), this iPhone was dunked in raw sewage.

Unfortunately, no backups means you’re one dunk, one drop, one theft, one loss, or one failure away from loss.

If you used iCloud Photos and iCloud Contacts, or iCloud backups, the data remains available in iCloud. Log into iCloud.com, and check.

If you did not do backups and did not use iCloud for your data or your backups, you’ve just learned an all-too-common lesson about data preservation, and one that too many of us do get to learn through data loss.

You might find a data recovery service willing to try to extract data from the dunked device, though data recovery here is far from certain. You’ll have to pay for that attempted data recovery, and success is far from assured.

MrHoffman wrote:

Amalfiluv wrote:

What do you mean by sewage? It was clean water and the phone was barely wet?

Unless the phone went into the reservoir tank (if this toilet even has one), this iPhone was dunked in raw sewage.

Unfortunately, no backups means you’re one dunk, one drop, one theft, one loss, or one failure away from loss.

If you used iCloud Photos and iCloud Contacts, or iCloud backups, the data remains available in iCloud. Log into iCloud.com, and check.

If you did not do backups and did not use iCloud for your data or your backups, you’ve just learned an all-too-common lesson about data preservation, and one that too many of us do get to learn through data loss.

You might find a data recovery service willing to try to extract data from the dunked device, though data recovery here is far from certain. You’ll have to pay for that attempted data recovery, and success is far from assured.

Some data recovery services don't charge a thing (except maybe to ship it back to the owner) if they can't recover any data.

I also wouldn't categorize falling into a toilet bowl to be falling into raw sewage as long as it was relatively clear water that didn't need to be flushed. It's not necessarily the most ideal environment, but I'd be hard pressed to categorize it as being "dunked in sewage" in any meaningful way that differs from falling into clean tap water. I certainly wouldn't think that it would be any more damaging than clean tap water.

Now if it needed to be flushed, then eewwww......