Detailed Analysis
A Reddit user posting to r/Anthropic has reported a persistent authentication failure with the Claude iOS app on an iPhone 11, in which one Google account consistently triggers a "Sorry, try again later" error while a separate Google account on the same device logs in without issue. The problem began approximately two weeks after the app was first installed and successfully used, suggesting the failure was not a first-run configuration problem but rather a state change that occurred at some point during normal usage. Critically, deleting and reinstalling the app did not resolve the issue, indicating the failure state is not stored locally on the device but is instead persisted server-side, likely tied to the specific Google account's session or token record in Anthropic's authentication backend.
The account-specific nature of the failure is the most diagnostically significant detail in the report. Because a secondary Google account authenticates successfully on the exact same device and app build, the issue is almost certainly not caused by device incompatibility, iOS version conflicts, or a corrupted local app installation. Instead, the pattern strongly points toward a stuck or corrupted OAuth token, a rate-limited or flagged account session, or a broken refresh token cycle associated specifically with the original Google account. When third-party apps use Google OAuth for authentication, access tokens expire and must be refreshed using a long-lived refresh token; if that refresh token becomes invalid or is revoked — through a password change, a security event, or a backend error — the app may enter an unrecoverable error state that survives reinstallation because the corruption lives in Anthropic's session store, not the device.
This type of issue reflects a broader challenge in consumer AI app authentication design: error messaging that is not sufficiently differentiated. A generic "try again later" response conflates transient server-side load issues with persistent account-level failures, leaving users unable to self-diagnose or self-remediate. In this case, the user correctly deduced through experimentation that the problem was account-specific, but that diagnosis required significant trial and error. Robust authentication systems typically surface distinct error codes or user-facing messages that distinguish between server overload, expired sessions, revoked credentials, and account-level restrictions — distinctions that would allow users to take appropriate action, such as re-linking their Google account through a web portal or contacting support with a precise error description.
The incident also illustrates a known friction point in the rapid scaling of AI assistant platforms. Anthropic has expanded Claude's consumer-facing app presence significantly, and as user volume grows, edge cases in authentication flows — particularly around OAuth token lifecycle management — become more likely to surface at scale. A server-side session that becomes permanently stuck without an automatic recovery path represents a product quality gap that, while affecting a small proportion of users, can result in complete loss of access to the service with no clear remediation path. The standard resolution in such cases involves Anthropic's support team manually clearing the corrupted session record, or the user revoking Claude's access permissions directly through their Google account security settings and re-authenticating from a clean state — a step the original poster does not appear to have attempted and which was not surfaced by the app's error messaging.
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