Chosen Solution
I dropped it into the bathtub but quickly put it in rice to get the water off. My fingerprint scanner works perfectly fine but the home button won’t let me unlock my phone or go home, or anything. I have to turn my phone off completely and when I do that it doesn’t let me swipe it for it to turn off. Then immediately it turns back on. There’s also dark spots on the screen. They don’t interfere with what I’m doing though. One is a big oval shape in the middle of my screen. In the top right corner there are just splatters of them and when you tilt your phone away, the whole bottom part is a dark brown. I don’t know how to take my phone apart. I don’t even think I have the right screwdrivers and such for it.
@kangarootown , do not try to power on the device any more and remove the battery ASAP. Follow the steps in the guides below to take the phone apart and clean the device of water damage. If you have problems after this, get back to us and we will try to help further. If not comfortable working on your device take it into a good local repair shop for a diagnoses and estimate on repair. Good luck. I hope this helped you out, if so let me know by pressing the helpful button. iPhone 5s Teardown Electronics Water Damage
Hi there Since you don’t have the propper tools to open the device yourself, I suggest you take it to a local repair shop. I’ve had some similar complaints from customers after they dropped their phones in water. Sometimes the ‘click mechanism’ doesn’t work because of corrosion on the contact points, which is easily resolved by applying some rubbing alcohol to them and carefully scraping away the corrosion. Other times nothing helps and the button needs to be replaced, which will unfortunately mean you’ll lose all TouchID functionality. If you do want to attempt to replace the button yourself, there’s an easy guide over here: iPhone 5s Home Button Replacement. The repair isn’t difficult at all :) Best of luck!
