Why won't my earphone icon go away when nothing is plugged into it ?

[AC Question]

why wont my earphone icon go awaywhen nothing is plugged into it ?

yesterday I went to make a call on my Samsung mini s4 and I could not hear the ringer or the person I was trying to talk to , then I noticed the earphone icon was on . I scrolled down and seen that it had a touch button to turn on the speaker and then I could hear the other person .
after hanging up I noticed that where the touch button was there was also icons for you tube,phone,video play, and voice recorder. ive gone into application manager then into pagebuddynotisvc and disabled it and then restarted my phone ,, the icon went away but I still have no volume when making a call or listening to youtube unless I have the earphones plugged in ..
is there some other way of getting it back to not using the earphones and not having to turn on the speaker to make a call ??? please help any info is greatly needed ...

 

[Wayne Sanders]

Re: why wont my earphone icon go awaywhen nothing is plugged into it ?

When that happened to me, there was lint and whatever in the earphone jack.

 

[Wm7Long]

Re: why wont my earphone icon go awaywhen nothing is plugged into it ?

Two points...

Wayne Sanders has point #1: When you plug earphones in, you push open a spring loaded contact, disconnecting the circuit for normal earpiece sound. If lint or other fuzzy pocket debris gets between contacts, then the circuit stays broken after pulling earphones plug out.

The other point regards pagebuddynotisvc. Back when I was using the stock Samsung ROM and I disabled pagebuddy, some notifications stop'd showing up for me. You may want to re-enable it?