very low volume on speaker phone iPhone 7+

Recently I have been noticing that if I use speaker phone on my 7+ the volume is very low to the point of being unusable even if it is turned up all the way (phone calls that are not on speaker phone are fine). I also had an issue this morning where there was no sound from the alarm even though from the screen it appeared to be going off at the time it was set for. I would normally assume that this means that the speaker is going out, but if I listen to music on it without headphones the speaker works just fine, and the volume is as loud as I ever remember it being. I am on iOS 11.4.1 which I believe is the latest version if that is relevant.

Anyone have any ideas what is going wrong with it and if it can be fixed?

The first thing I would try is to reset the phone (reboot it). If that doesn't seem to help, then I would try to restore the phone using iTunes or a third party app such as iMazing 2. Be sure to make a backup both to your Mac using iTunes and also to iCloud before restoring the phone.

Just to note what you stated above... the speaker is apparently okay is you can listen to music without headphones. You might want to review all your sound settings and preferences again before doing anything else.

I've tried rebooting it a few times since the issue showed up, but it hasn't seemed to accomplish much. I probably will go ahead and try restoring it, I've just been hesitant to do that because I live out in a rural area and we still have very low data caps on internet out here, so by the time I get all my content from iTunes back on there I've gone through most of my internet for the month.

I understand your dilemma about restoring the phone. Is it possible to go somewhere that has free WiFi and do it from there? I know that too is not ideal if you need to restore sensitive data that are the result of certain apps such as finance or banking.

chscag said:

I understand your dilemma about restoring the phone. Is it possible to go somewhere that has free WiFi and do it from there? I know that too is not ideal if you need to restore sensitive data that are the result of certain apps such as finance or banking.

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So I found out that there is an option to just reset all settings instead of reset content and settings so I tried that and it seems to have worked for the moment at least.

As for your question about if there is somewhere with free wifi, there really isn't, there is a coffee shop that has it, and the hospital, but they both ask you not to download large files, and at least the hospital actively blocks sites that use large amounts of data. We have one internet carrier here, and since they have a monopoly they keep prices high and don't really offer unlimited even for businesses.

That's starting to change since we got an undersea fiber cable connecting us back to the rest of the country last year, but currently that is only being sold to businesses and none of them have chosen to offer free wifi using it. (right before that came online the company that had the monopoly on the internet market made a big push to get businesses to commit to contracts with them so most of them are stuck for awhile before they can switch).

So I found out that there is an option to just reset all settings instead of reset content and settings so I tried that and it seems to have worked for the moment at least.

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Well, that's good news. Hopefully that will resolve the problem. And good luck in the future with some decent and inexpensive WiFi.