If it is the soft-touch plastic, the answer is to use alcohol and just remove it. The hard plastics stand up over time but the soft plastics turn into a gummy mess. A common one is headphones.

FWIW, it’s probably not your fault

For degraded rubberized surfaces on computer peripherals (I'm looking at you, Logitech) I now use WD40.

I soak pretty much the entire device in it and leave it overnight in the open. Most of the WD40 will have evaporated, leaving behind a film of dissolved degraded rubber and other gunk. You then use alcohol-free wet wipes to rub all that off and leave the device to dry.

I found that this approach requires less rubbing and scrubbing, useful for bigger batches. Don't worry about the smell, it airs out in a couple of days.

Not sure if it's feasible with tiny textured things, but I covered my degrading bicycle handles with gaffing tape. Been good for almost three years now.

But yeah I always clean things with soap and water or all purpose spray from local bulk store. Alcohol is often to stronk for most things in the normal house. Also as others have said, it might not even be the alcohol, "rubber" surfaces often deglade like that no matter what you do.

It may not be you.

There's some polymer substance that was used to create "rubberized" coatings on a lot of consumer electronics some years back that degrades to a sticky mess over time on its own. I had a Grundig G6 shortwave radio that did it badly, as well as some other devices.

I donlt believe that you can "undegrade" it, but if it's the same stuff, you can manage to remove it, just leave unrubberized plastic.

I used isopropyl alcohol and a lot of elbow grease, which eventually works.

This blog mentions it:

https://swling.com/blog/2021/01/getting-the-grundig-g6-out-of-a-sticky-situation/

They recommend "Purple Power".

Tip for non-USonians: what’s sold as “Purple Power” (and “Simple Green”, and several other frequently-recommended cleaners for this sort of thing) are not necessarily the same products around the world. For example, in the US “Purple Power” is an ethylene glycol based cleaner/degreaser; here in Aus, if you ask for “Purple Power” you’ll get a sodium hydroxide based degreaser.

One will clean the gunk off your radio; the other will clean the gunk and most of the labelling off…

These guys have some recommendations of their own:

https://www.ifixit.com/News/93833/ask-ifixit-how-do-i-fix-sticky-plastics

Last time I looked into this the answer was no - it’s a permanent chemical change you can’t heal or stop or cover.

The best thing I’ve found was to keep using alcohol wipes to scrape away the gooey top surface every once in a while. ☹️

I've had excellent results with Fantastik. I was told it's original intent was for belts and pucks on analog tape machines and was sold under the name "Audiosol".

The Volkswagen guys want to know the answer to this too

I recently saw somewhere that gasoline can help. Might be total bullshit, or depend on the exact material. Might be worth trying on a very small area of the rubber surface. Outside in the shade. Gas fumes are bad.

The explanation I’ve seen before is these are usually a soft-touch plastic and they’re made “soft-touch” by adding oils to the plastic, but they leach out over time putting a sticky layer on the now-harder plastic. The rubbing alcohol can help clean away the oil and stickiness but the plastic won’t be soft anymore.