Are you having a problem hearing sound on Vine or Snapchat on your iPhone? Here is a solution I found.

The Problem

Videos on Vine or Snapchat play with no sound on your iPhone, even if your sound is turned up. That’s the problem my wife and I were having (well, we mainly use Snapchat, but it turned out that this was a problem on Vine, too). Looking back, it’s ridiculous that it took me as long as I did to find the solution to the problem.

What should have been a simple solution (and it was simple) wasn’t very easy to find for some reason.

What didn’t work

Admittedly, I’m not the iPhone user in the house (my wife is), so perhaps this problem seems obvious to hardcore iPhone users. But I ran across many forums with people having the same problem, so perhaps it isn’t obvious to everyone. I spent over 30 minutes looking through forums and question/answer sites – never really finding the answer. Below are the things I tried before finding the solution. Most of these were suggested in forums discussing the “no sound in Snapchat” problem.

• Uninstalling and reinstalling the app. We did it with Snapchat, but not Vine (if it didn’t work with Snapchat, there was no reason to try it with Vine!)
• Restarting the phone.
• Going into Snapchat settings and turning the microphone on.
• Making sure the phone’s sound was on.
• Making sure audio worked in other apps, such as YouTube.

What Worked

Finally – buried pages back in the search results – I found the simple answer I sought:

The side switch was set to mute.

This isn’t a feature my wife really used much, so it never occurred to us that it could be the problem. In your iPhone settings, you can set the side switch to either lock the screen rotation or mute the phone. Even if it is set to mute, you’ll still hear some sounds. In our case, we usually keep the phone muted, so never noticed the switch was on because we always had sound when streaming videos.

The side switch on my wife’s blingy iPhone 5.

So to fix the problem, you can either set the side switch to “Lock Rotation” in the settings, or you can simply toggle it off. In our case, a simple toggle brought glorious sound back to Snapchat and Vine.

Surprisingly, Snapchat has a (rather useless) help page addressing the “no sound” issue, and doesn’t mention this solution. They simply state:

It is possible to mute the audio when recording a Snap, please verify that the videos were sent with audio and that your volume is turned up. If other people received the same Snaps or Stories and also did not hear audio, the problem is not with your device.

Other Sound Problems

The problem and solution above are not comprehensive. During my searches, I ran across many Snapchat users who had the opposite problem: They could hear sound but not record it. In many of those cases, it appeared that the solution was to turn the microphone on in the Snapchat settings.

Bottom Line

If you’re unable to hear sound on Snapchat or Vine videos on an iPhone, try toggling the side switch to see if that fixes it.