A friend asked me to fix an issue on his phone: he couldn’t connect to the Play Store or Gmail, and kept seeing “Connection problem, try again later.”

After some investigation, here’s what I found.

Common causes:

  1. Google Play Services has been removed or disabled.
  2. Google Play Services is outdated — try updating it.

  1. If you’re using a system cleaner app, make sure Google Play Services is whitelisted — some cleaners kill it in the background.