Technopragmatics

A few days ago I were outside when it started raining. My phone rang and I pulled it out of my pocket to answer. The conversation went on for a few minutes, during which the iPhone were exposed to the rain.

When I got inside I noticed a popup window on my lock screen stating an error message: “This accessory is not made to work with iPhone”. I unlocked the phone, closed the popup window and didn’t bother doing anything else about it. A few hours later the message appeared again, and all of a sudden I got an SMS text message - but with no sound playing during the receival! I opened the iPod application and tried playing a song, but there was nothing but silence.

I realized the loss of sound could be related to the rain incident outside that happened earlier, so I turned it off and tried using a piece of toilet paper to clean the USB and headphone connectors. I let it dry up for a while, and turned it on again to see if the sound had started working again. No luck there, everything except the incoming call ringtone were dead silent.

Search Google however lead me up to an interesting thread over at Macrumors, where several people had the same issues as me, but also during while charging or using it in a dock. A certain post by the user funnysuresh poses a solution to the problem; it seems that deleting a file causes the phone to re-initialize the IAP stack which is related to the serial port interface.

How to fix it? Read the thread, or…

FOR JAILBREAKED IPHONES WITH FIRMWARE VERSION < 2.0

1. Use Cydia or Installer to install a Terminal emulator (e.g. MobileTerminal) or file manager.
2. Navigate to /System/Library/Frameworks/IAP.framework/Support/
3. There should be one file in that folder that begins with “apd”
4. Remove that file
5. Shutdown the phone and start it up again
6. And there was sound!

FOR JAILBREAKED IPHONES WITH FIRMWARE VERSION >= 2.0

1. Use Cydia or Installer to install a Terminal emulator (e.g. MobileTerminal) or file manager.
2. Navigate to /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/IAP.framework/Support/
3. There should be one file in that folder that begins with “iapd” (notice the filename change from firmware versions <2.0)
4. Remove that file
5. Shutdown the phone and start it up again
6. And there was sound!

My guess is that the temporary shortage of some connector in the phone, either through the headphone jack or the USB cable connector, caused it to think it was connected to a dock or some other peripheral device and made it stay in that state. Removing the above file would cause the phone to re-initialize the serial interface thus restoring it to the “normal” state, without any external devices attached to it.

If someone has any more light to shed on this, please comment!