This is my worst day ever just formatted my laptop and forgot to backup my Android keystore........😤😤😬 Just visited stack overflow only to learn that without the keystore you can't make updates for your app.I will never update my apps on playstore now.... Shit. Am fucked totally...👹👹

Hm.. Can't you resign the apk and republish? After that just delete the old one or try to alert your users of the change. Deprecate the old app and redirect to the "new" one.
Haven't published any apps yet, so I don't know, just trying to help :)

@imerljak he needs the old key to do anything with existing apps. he has to create new apps and delete the old ones which if you have alot of good ratings sucks to do.

That really sucks. I've always been worried about doing that so I try to back it up in a lot of places.

That's the nice thing about iOS, don't have to worry about the key.

I feel you man. Happened to me recently too. I did back it up but i backed it up on my work laptop. That laptop was reformatted without me knowing and now im fucked.

My app is a paid app btw. If i unpublish the existing and publish a new one, how will i make sure the users who bought the first one retain their purchase?

It is possible that it is still there if it wasn't overwritten with new data. Shut it down, fire up live cd with recovery software and start searching.

Try with testdisk - very good restore software, have restored items from a 2x formatted disk!

@yusijs mainly because unless you 0 out the drive "links" to files are the only thing actually deleted! It is his best bet try recovery software

Can't you just publish an apk with a different key in the existing google play entry?

People won't be able to update without uninstalling and reinstalling your app though

@Renze nope. Not possible. One key per entry.

You can recover keystore file use recovery tools like recuva or easeus data recovery.
If you are lucky then you'll​ get your keystore back ...