Broken phone? This Ottawa TikToker might be able to help

Most people are having a bad day if they break their phones, but Ottawa's Suhaib El-Komy has turned that moment into a tech repair career.

Under the handle Phone Repair Guru, El-Komy has amassed 4.7 million subscribers on TikTok and 3.75 million on YouTube, sharing videos on how to fix everything from a broken screen to a dirty charging port.

Until recently, he never showed his face or shared his story.

"I don't think I was ready for that kind of exposure," said the 23-year-old.

"But I've gotten a little older since then, and I'm more or less comfortable with it."

The first phone

In the past eight years, El-Komy said he's fixed over 8,000 devices, but it all started with his own.

When he was 14 years old, he woke up one day to find his phone cracked on the floor. 

"I was pretty annoyed. I didn't have a lot of money at the time." 

He needed to figure out how to fix it for cheap and tried to do it himself. He broke the home button in the process, but the phone worked. 

He said "it was a joyous feeling" realizing he actually could repair it. "It made me very happy. And I wanted to keep doing that."

Though he was still in high school, El-Komy decided to start advertising his repair services online, turning his new skills into a business with the goal of saving people money. 

"I saw this kind of void where people were paying way too much for repairs and they started getting new phones." 

Becoming the Phone Repair Guru

El-Komy learned the basics by watching old YouTube videos. 

"You kind of learn the internal mechanics of how a phone works, or how an electronic device works," he said.

"From there, you can pretty much fix anything."

But he said he found the existing content difficult to follow and inaccessible for a general audience. He decided to make his own videos, working out of a small office in Bells Corners to answer questions people had about their devices. 

"I wanted to make those kinds of answers more readily available to people in a fun, very easy way … and through TikTok, that was the best way to do it." 

Saving phones from the bottom of a lake

He also got to take on some unusual repair jobs — for example, a package of phones that arrived straight from the bottom of a lake.

That's thanks to a B.C. diver who goes by the name Aquatic Monkey on TikTok. He followed the Phone Repair Guru and decided to mail him 10 phones he'd recovered.

"These phones are in a state. They're rusted, they're salty, they smell really bad. But surprisingly, I've actually gotten two on," said Suhaib, adding he even found the owner of one of them. 

"She didn't want the phone. But I managed to get the phone on, which was absolutely mind-blowing. It was crazy."

Suhaib said he's part of a growing community of social media creators focused on teaching each other and their audiences new repair skills. He said that motivates him to find new ways to make a real difference for the people watching.

"Just by spreading that knowledge that it is fixable," he said. 

"We save a lot of tech from going into the garbage … we're saving the environment and we're saving people's phones. So everybody's happy."