It's Way Past Time for Every Phone to Be Waterproof

Everyone has a story about the time they jumped into the pool with their phone in their pocket, or dropped it in the toilet, or spilled a beer on it. In every case, that was the death of their phones. And yet somehow, waterproofing is a niche and surprising feature for smartphones. Samsung made a whole ad campaign about it, with Lil' Wayne pouring champagne on every Galaxy S7 he could find. Sony touted the water-resistance of the Xperia Z5. A briefly viral YouTube meme found that Apple's iPhone 6S and 6S Plus could handle some submersion, though you're still tempting fate if you try and dunk yours.

The majority of today's smartphones can't handle even a five-second dip in the sink or the toilet. There are too many cracks, holes, and ports where water can squeeze itself in. There are, of course, options for those who crave waterproofing: stick on a fat innertube of a case, buy a phone made by a construction company, or just go with the good ol' Ziploc bag.

That's not good enough. Not even close. Your phone's one of the most expensive things you own, and it's almost certainly the device most full of important memories and information. It goes everywhere with you, or at least you'd like it to. (You know you'd take your phone in the shower if you could.) Yet we're all one back-pocket slip or super-humid day from it all just disappearing.

In 2012, SquareTrade, which sells insurance against lots of electronics, released its Smartphone Accident Survey. Two of the five most common accident scenarios were "Immersed in liquid" and "Liquid spilled on it." Even now, says Vince Tseng, SquareTrade's chief services officer, the only thing they see more than liquid damage is cracked screens. And everyone's working on cracked screens.

Somehow, your phone's fragility has been made out to be your fault—if you break it, you must have been doing something wrong. You have to buy AppleCare, or some other aftermarket insurance you hopefully won't need and definitely shouldn't have to pay for. Your phone's ability to survive a spilled drink shouldn't be worthy of Lil' Wayne's time, Samsung's ad budget, or all that wasted bubbly. It should be like its ability to make phone calls—every phone should be waterproof. Why aren't they already?

It's obviously good for consumers to have more phones that can handle a drizzle. But the case for waterproof phones is also remarkably easy to make to manufacturers. At least, that's what Simon McElrea, CEO of electronics-waterproofing company Semblant, tells me. It's simple economics: A lot of phones get returned, he says, "and at least half of that return rate is damage." Maintaining a return and repair infrastructure is expensive, so if you have fewer repairs, you make more money. Plus, as the usable lifespan of a smartphone gets longer, companies can refurbish and recycle devices as long as they continue to work. Even as they make new phones, McElrea says, "95 percent of the components are the same generation to generation. You upgrade the processor, maybe a new version of the memory, but just about everything else is the same." The longer those parts continue to work, the more times you can re-sell them for more money.

Semblant makes a nano-coating that's designed to keep electronics safe from water, rust, and more. Whereas Samsung, Sony, and others try to ruggedize their phones by essentially shellacking them shut the way you'd seal your bathtub, Semblant says bring on the water. "You know water's going to get in," McElrea says. "And it's not pure water. The only time it's pure water is in those silly tests." A lot of times, moisture can ruin a phone without you ever doing anything wrong; it's just the result of chemistry and time. McElrea's favorite demo is to use nitric acid: It will eat through the phone, the table it's on, and the floor beneath, but just sits beaded like drops of water on top of a Semblant-coated smartphone. (It's a good demo.)

Semblant's technology is already being put into a million phones a day from a variety of manufacturers, McElrea says, most of whom don't tout the feature. They don't want to announce their waterproofness, lest they have to cover it in the phone's warranty. But it's there. McElrea won't talk about who his customers are, except to say "there aren't many left" to get on board. If that's true, it's good news—it doesn't mean your phone's suddenly going scuba diving with you, but it means it'll take a lot more to hurt it than a little fall of rain.

McElrea has plenty of incentive to downplay the current seal-it-with-glue waterproofing, of course. But Kyle Wiens, founder of iFixit (and occasional WIRED contributor), says the challenges of that approach are precisely the reason your phone isn't already waterproof. "If you look at what kills phones over a five-year lifespan," he says, "you're going to have to open the phone once or twice during that life and swap out the battery. And the process of doing that, and re-sealing it with the gaskets and stuff like that, is pretty challenging."

Not only that, that kind of seal is hard to pull off in the first place. "Waterproofing isn't just dipping it in wax, and presto, it resists water," Tseng says. And both Wiens and McElrea note the difference in manufacturing quality between, say, a high-end watch and a smartphone. "With a Rolex," Wiens says, "if you open it up and put it back together it'll be waterproof again. A lot of times it's just more precision machining." That's hard to do at massive scale, especially at the costs phone makers are trying to hit.

OK, so waterproofing is hard. At least, it's hard the way manufacturers are currently approaching it. Everyone I spoke to says seals are a hacky, brute-force solution, but sees huge potential in ruggedizing not the phone as a whole, but each part individually. "The most compelling solution that I've seen," Wiens says, "is maybe doing waterproofing more at the component level, saying it's OK if water gets inside the device. There are microfilms that you can coat the board with that will waterproof the board." He doesn't mention Semblant by name, but that's what Semblant is doing.

Waterproofing the insides is also what Apple is doing, at least if you believe rumors and patent filings. The company applied for a patent in 2014 covering "methods for increasing moisture resistance of electrical components," and may have used some of that tech in the surprisingly-resistant 6S. Part of its logic for removing the headphone jack on the iPhone 7 is reportedly that it makes it easier to seal the device as well. Maybe if the next iPhone is also resistant to water and Coke and every other liquid, Tim Cook will talk about it. And you can bet that if Cook gets on stage next week and dunks an iPhone 7 in a bowl of water, waterproof phones will be everywhere in an instant. Fingers crossed.