Without any warning my phone speaker on my iPhone failed. The speaker phone worked, the hearphones worked on phone calls as did the bluetooth connection/speaker.
This happened Wednesday 13th July.
So I went to the internet to find the solution and although I tried a number of the solutions I found there from a complete restore from the backup to following complicated routines of unplugging and plugging in the headphones whilst starting and stopping the iPod player nothing seemed to work for me.
I was convinced it was a software issue but was resigned to a hardware fault. I was going to book an appointment at an Apple shop, on Monday but one of my engineers was off sick so I had no time to do this, when just as suddenly, I realised, as I answered a call and was about to switch on the speaker phone I could hear the caller through the normal phone speaker!
Well I was very happy about this but puzzled by it just starting. The only thing that I had done that day was to update four apps on the iPhone – don’t ask me which ones because I do not remember, but may be one of these patched the software issue, possible it was that app that caused the problem in the first place. Who knows?
Speaker magically resurrected Monday 18th July!
The one saving grace in the issue was the minature bluetooth earpiece i bought from Tesco sometime back. I linked this to my iPhone so I could continue to use it whilst the phone healed itself!