No Volume Bar on iPhone

The Problem: No Volume Bar on iPhone

I have an iPhone 4 that suddenly decided to act out and wouldn't let me change its volume. There was no sound coming out when I play music on speaker, but I could hear it through earphones. Volume +/- would show the ringer bar all the way up, but when I tried to call my number using another phone, my iPhone didn’t ring. When playing music, pressing the Volume +/- buttons doesn’t show the volume bar (as shown on the screenshot below).

The Solution:
Clean the headset and charger ports using a clean, dry brush. 

I used a manicure brush 'coz I’m so posh. LOL. JK, I just didn’t have any spare toothbrush lying around, but you can use pretty much anything with bristles. Be very gentle, you don’t want to apply unnecessary pressure. It will just take 3-4 swipes anyway. You just have to dust the ports off.

The Cause:
“There was no sound coming out when I play music on speaker, but I could hear it through earphones.” This should’ve been my first clue. For some reason, the phone thinks that it still has an earphone or some other speaker connected to it (even when there’s none) so it doesn’t use the phone’s speaker to play sound. Accumulation of dust, or sometimes moisture, could cause it. Take note that iPhone docks are speakers, too, and that’s why you also have to clean the charger port.

Other things you can try:

These are the popular picks I’ve gathered (and tried) from online fora which you can try in case cleaning the charger port doesn’t work:

1. Enable Assistive Touch.
Settings > General Accessibility > Assistive Touch
You can change the volume from the on-screen buttons, eliminating the need to use the volume buttons on the side of the phone.

2. 'Play a Sound'  using Find My iPhone
Install Find my iPhone app on your phone, if you haven’t yet. Then login to iCloud from another device. It will locate your phone (make sure it is connected to the internet via wifi or data) and you will have an option to play a sound on it. It will not solve the issue, per se, but it will let you test if the speakers themselves are working or not and find out if it's just a dust issue.

3. Use a Q-tip and rubbing alcohol to clean the headset jack/port.
I had a hard time doing this because the Q-tips I had were too thick and wouldn’t fit the jack so I used a toothpick and wrapped it in cotton. Sadly, still no go for me.

4. Reset the phone.      

General> Reset > Reset All Settings 
This resets user preferences but don’t worry, it won’t delete your media files and apps/messages unless you select the option for Reset All Contents and Settings, so make sure that you select the right one. I regret having done this step, though, because it didn’t do anything and now I have to re-apply my preferences such as alarm sounds, wallpaper, passcode, etc.

*This was originally posted from my other blog.