Since the advent of new techniques in low temperature physics, the polaron problem — quantum impurity and a large quantum medium" — has received renewed attention from experimentalists, theorists, and mathematicians alike. In contrast to widely studied models with contact interactions, the case when the impurity interacts with the medium via long-ranged potentials is still largely unexplored and only recently attacked in experiments with ions in cold gases. Here, we are going to present the first rigorous derivation of the well-known Fröhlich Hamiltonian as an effective theory for the polaron problem consisting of an impurity immersed in a Bose gas, in a suitable mean-field limit corresponding to the long-ranged case. If time permits, we shall (heuristically) discuss surprising connections to the fermionic counterpart of the problem.