Cleaning Your Phone Without Damaging It

Last winter a man in my class brought in a phone whose screen looked like it had been polished with sandpaper. The coating that makes a smartphone screen feel smooth under your finger was completely gone. He'd been cleaning it twice a day for two years with Windex and a paper towel. He had the cleanest, scratchiest screen I have ever held.

You cannot fix this. Once that coating is gone, it's gone. So before anything else, here are the things to never use on a phone screen: Windex, glass cleaner of any kind, kitchen counter spray, hand sanitizer, rubbing alcohol stronger than 70 percent, paper towels, dish towels, and the corner of your shirt if your shirt has buttons on it. Each of those will, over time, strip the oleophobic coating off the glass.

Now the good news. Cleaning a phone properly takes about thirty seconds and the right materials cost under ten dollars total.

What you actually need

A microfiber cloth — the kind that comes with eyeglasses, or that you can buy in a three-pack at the drug store for five bucks. That's it for daily cleaning. Wipe in small circles. Done.

For when the phone is genuinely grimy — sweat on the back, lotion smears, that weird sticky residue that develops in a purse pocket — a 50/50 mix of distilled water and 70-percent isopropyl alcohol, applied to the cloth (not directly to the phone). Both Apple and Samsung now officially say this is fine on their hardware. It wasn't always; this changed during the pandemic.

If you don't want to mix anything, the pre-moistened lens-cleaning wipes from the eyeglass aisle are the same thing in a foil packet. About eight bucks for a hundred wipes. I keep a packet in my truck.

The bit nobody talks about

The dirtiest part of a smartphone is not the screen. It's the speaker grille at the bottom edge and the earpiece slot above the screen. Pocket lint, dust, and the kind of grit that nobody can quite identify all collect in there. Over time the phone gets quieter, and most people blame their hearing.

Get a soft-bristled toothbrush. A baby toothbrush is ideal. Hold the phone screen-down and brush gently across the speaker holes for about ten seconds. You'll see grey fuzz come out. Don't poke anything into the holes — no toothpicks, no sewing needles, no pen tips. The speaker membrane behind those holes is fragile.

The earpiece slot at the top is the same idea. Brush across, not down into it.

If you do this once a month, your phone calls will stay loud for the lifetime of the device. The number of people I've helped who thought they needed a hearing aid and actually just needed a toothbrush — it's not a small number.

The charging port

Same problem, worse consequences. Lint builds up at the bottom of the USB-C port until eventually the charging cable won't seat all the way in. The phone reports "charging slowly" or simply stops charging.

Don't poke a paper clip in there. The pins inside the port can be bent and you've just turned a fixable problem into a replace-the-phone problem.

What works: a wooden toothpick, used with patience. Insert it gently into the port, scrape the inside walls — not the back surface where the pins are — and pull straight back out. A surprising amount of lint comes out. Do it in good light so you can see what you're doing.

Once a quarter is plenty.

The back of the phone

If you use a case, you don't really need to clean the back of the phone. But if you take the case off once or twice a year (which I covered in my phone cases piece), wipe the back with the same microfiber cloth, and wipe out the inside of the case too. Dust accumulates inside the case and scratches the back over time.

The camera lens cluster on the back is glass, just like the front screen, and gets greasy from your fingerprint. Microfiber, small circles, done.

What about disinfecting

If someone in the house has been sick and you want to disinfect the phone, the 50/50 alcohol-and-distilled-water mix is what to use. Clorox wipes and Lysol wipes are officially endorsed by Apple now for occasional use. Don't make it a daily habit — the disinfectant ingredients do degrade the coating over the long term.

Don't submerge the phone, even the new water-resistant ones. The water-resistance ratings on phones are tested with new gaskets in fresh water. Two years into a phone's life, those gaskets are not what they were on day one. Treat the rating as a margin for an accidental spill, not as a license to dunk.

The man with the scratched screen

I gave him a microfiber cloth from my bag. We tried buffing the scratched coating with it. It didn't help. The phone still worked, and it still works today, but every photo he takes looks slightly hazy because the screen reads as cloudy from the inside. He bought a new phone last spring. He uses a microfiber cloth now.

The cost of getting this right is one cloth and one toothbrush. Most things in the smartphone universe are not that simple. Take the win.

Written by Robert Sandoval. Last verified 19 June 2026.