We describe fully explicit residual based discretizations of the shallow water equations with friction on unstructured grids. The schemes are obtained by properly adapting the explicit construction proposed in Ricchiuto and Abgrall (2010) . In particular, previous work on well balanced integration (Ricchiuto, 2011 ) and preservation of the depth non-negativity (Ricchiuto and Bollermann, 2009 ) is reformulated in the context of a genuinely explicit time stepping still based on a weighted residual approximation. The paper discusses in depth how to achieve in this context an exact preservation of all the simple known steady equilibria, and how to obtain a super-consistent approximation for smooth non-trivial moving equilibria. The treatment of the wetting/drying interface is also discussed, giving formal conditions for the preservation of the non-negativity of the depth for a particular case, based on a nonlinear variant of a Lax–Friedrichs type scheme. The approach is analyzed and tested thoroughly. The quality of the numerical results shows the interest in the proposed approach over previously proposed schemes, in terms of accuracy and efficiency.