What to Do when Your iPhone's Volume Buttons Break

The iPhone's an amazing machine, but it's just that--a machine--and given enough time, it'll start to break down. I found this out the hard way when the volume buttons on the side of my iPhone suddenly stopped working. Well, actually, the volume up button stopped working. The phone still let me turn the volume of the ringer or music down, but that's not much help, is it?

Within a few days, I was missing a ton of calls, and what's worse, the alarm function on the iPhone wasn't loud enough to wake me up. Like a lot of people, I depend on my phone as an alarm clock, so I looked for alarm clock apps to get around the problem before I realized that avoiding the problems of an iPhone's broken volume buttons was fairly simple.

If your iPhone's volume buttons stop working, here are a few things that you can do to restore functionality to your phone.

Apple's Warranty Program. The first thing you've probably thought of is contacting Apple to get your phone fixed. This should be your first course of action unless the phone is out of warranty or if you've taken the phone apart or something like that. Apple's warranty program will repair just about anything, and there's nothing like a repaired phone, right?

If you haven't tried anything to fix your iPhone's volume buttons, don't. Call Apple and get the problem fixed.

Work-arounds. My iPhone was out of warranty, so Apple's warranty program wasn't an option. Luckily, you can adjust the volume of your iPhone's ringtone through the phone's software settings. Here's how to do this.

Go to your Settings app and tap Sounds. Under Ring, there's a slider bar. You can slide that up to manually set your ringer volume to the right level. By the way, you can also adjust the vibrate option here and remove some of the sounds that annoy certain iPhone users.

Using a third party repair service. As a last resort, you can contact a service like RapidRepair to have them fix your iPhone for you. In some instances, they'll charge less than Apple and they'll complete your repair very quickly. However, they're not going to provide you with a temporary replacement phone, so keep that in mind.

Call around and talk to a few different iPhone repair services and see what they'll charge to switch out your volume buttons on the iPhone. They should be able to give you a straight answer--it's a fairly simple and straightforward repair.

Have your iPhone's volume buttons stopped working? Post in our comments section below.