Android Studio: cannot recover key

Question

I have searched StackOverflow for a while, but I just wanted to make sure...

I wiped my laptop a while ago, and backed up all my files. I have my android.jks file ba

Answer 1

[Update: This no longer works in Android studio 3.0 and above]

I faced the similar problem and none of the solutions worked after wasting 3 hours on Internet, I decided to dig deep.

Here is how I solved it: The "Cannot recover key" error for me was because my "Keystore password" was correct but the "Key Password" (of the key alias) was incorrect. I was pretty sure the both passwords were same but to my dismay they weren't and I didn't know what the second password was. As I had already signed an APK before I checked out the log file which can be found:

• C:\Users\your_username\.AndroidStudio2.1\system\log\

Open the log files from the date which you had signed the apk and look for the following entries:

 INFO - .project.GradleExecutionHelper - Passing command-line args to Gradle Tooling API: [--configure-on-demand, -Pandroid.injected.invoked.from.ide=true, 
-Pandroid.injected.signing.store.file=E:\HobbyProjects\XYZProject\gpsjs.jks, 
-Pandroid.injected.signing.store.password=***KeyStorePassword***, 
-Pandroid.injected.signing.key.alias=***alias_name***, 
-Pandroid.injected.signing.key.password=***Key password***, 

And you will find the passwords in plain text. This will even work if you forget passwords.