SOLVED: Can't establish a reliable connection to the server Google play store

A couple of days ago I faced a nasty problem with my Android phone: It was not able to sign in the Google account / store. I thaught it was a temporary issue at Google's servers and I tried a couple of hours later, but nothing changed. I tried some usual things like clearing the cache of some apps, restart the phone and even change my Google account password and I resetted the phone twice to fabrics defaults. Nothing could help.

I searched a lot of info on the internet and I found a hint about the hosts file. The hosts file is a computer file used by an operating system to map hostnames to IP addresses. I red that in some phones in the hosts file the adress to android.clients.google.com is translated to a certain IP address(es). Bang! what if Google changes the IP address for this domain?

The first thing I needed to do was to root the phone and gain permissions to open the hosts file.
I used Kingo ROOT which is a simple software to root the Android phones.

After that, I needed a file browser to browse the /etc folder and find the hosts file. But, I could not sign in to install an App for the purpose; I was able to download the app Root browser via another site and mail the app to my phone. Then I installed the app that I get as attachment in my mail.

I opened the hosts flie and I found this:


There were 2 nasty entries that translated the domain android.clients.google.com to 74.125.31.100 and 74.125.31.101

That was the problem! If I ping to this domain I get 74.125.136.139 as response.

I commented with a # the two entries, saved the file, rebooted the phone and my problem was resolved!

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