iPhone 7 audio issue after update

Hey guys, my boyfriend is facing audio issue on his iPhone 7. It all started few weeks ago after update. He was on call when his speaker started malfunctioning and phone restarted. After that both his speaker and microphone stopped working. Also his phone no longer recognizes wired headphones (just to make sure we tried my original headphones). I made some digging and learned about some audio issues due to iOS 14 updates so first thing we tried was deleting beta profile - nothing happened. Then we went through reset, hard reset and also factory reset - which at first seemed to have solved the problem - but later it all started all over again. What is important to mention is that his phone popped up notification that speaker is used by different app (that was after all the resets we did). My question is if this issue is repairable without the need to replace audio chip or if the replacement is the only option here. I see the replacement as the last option so I’m wondering if there’s any other way out of this. I’m curious because I also use iPhone 7, well I have iPhone 7 Plus but I from my research I learned it also happened on iPhone 7 Plus so I’m afraid that it might happen to my device too. Any advice is very much welcomed guys!