Does Samsung, or rather which manufacturers do cover water damage in their warranty? Not trying to stir ****, am just interested.
If the answer is all but Apple, that will suffice as an answer.
I'm not aware of any, including popular water-based cameras like GoPro.
Water resistance is a gimmick if it's not covered by warranty and bordering on fraud if warranty disclaimer isn't made clear alongside the water resistance claim.
Go look at a bunch of GoPro videos and start looking at that market. And like I said above, GoPro do not cover their product against water damage unless you purchase coverage, and even then it starts looking almost exactly like AppleCare.
Sometimes, gimmicks are just fine. But lets talk about liability and fraud.
Fraud: Lets say you purchase an iphone 7 and put it under 1m of water for 29m and it stops functioning. It's broke within the advertised spec.
Liability: The vendor has no way to know that the above was 1.1m of water or 31m of duration. So they absolve themselves of all liability because legally speaking, they can't measure how you used the product. But like I pointed out above, neither can GoPro.
However, since you brought up fraud, understand that every single test performed for water and iphone says that it exceeds (sometimes to major degrees) the IP67 rating. It would be very very hard to demonstrate fraud and thus imply that Apple is liable for water damage that it can't quantify. Legally speaking, that's the liability barrier which is why no company can cover it directly.
I have yet to hear of anyone reporting that the iphone 7 doesn't have great water protection well within spec. That really really doesn't help any fraud case.
So understand all that when someone advertises water resistance claims. There's always fine print and liability, but the end result is the consumer should still be better protected vs not having any water resistance, and there's no one guaranteeing any of that -- Apple is neither leading nor following anyone else here.
