Having an iPhone 5s speaker not work can really ruin someone's day. In order to deal with this problem, it's important to remember that there are a variety of ways that an iPhone 5s speaker can fail to emit sound. Going over a majority of the possibilities to ensure that you don't wind up wasting effort replacing a hardware component that isn't broken is important. Simply going down a checklist is important. Here are a couple of things to check before you try to replace your complicated iPhone 5s speaker.
1. Is anything in the headset slot?
iPhones will not play music or sound through the speakers if headphones or other devices are plugged into the headphone jack, says Apple's official guidelines. Be sure to remove any headphones before diagnosing whether or not the speaker is broken. Sometimes nothing is in the headphone slot, but a piece of debris falls into the jack and causes the iPhone to believe that something is plugged in to the slot. In order to deal with this, gently swab the iPhone headphone jack with a paperclip or a Q-tip in order to keep it from becoming clogged.
2. Is the phone set to mute?
A phone that is muted will not emit sound. Be sure to head to settings and check whether or not the phone's software is telling it to send sound to the speaker. Sometimes the phone won't send sound to the speaker due to a temporary bug. In order to fix this problem, simply turn the phone off with a hard reset, pressing it firmly on the home button for about 5 seconds, before turning it back on again. On occasion this will be the problem – some temporary crash of code that caused the phone to believe it was supposed to be muted – and then your speaker will work as good as new.
If neither of the above options is true, then it is more likely that your phone is suffering from a hardware error. There are many guides that can help you fix this yourself – but it will require some fairly intense management of small parts and some specialty tools. If you're interested in giving that a shot, then check out the iMore post on how. If that seems like it might be out of your reach, though, send your phone on over to us and we'll happily fix it for you.