After contacting google they said it was removed in order to restructure app store stats in general.
I am focused on user-growth and this is/was an important metric for me.
Today they messed up "Active installs". All my apps show 1
Google what are you doing ?
I would recommend they do get user feedback before removing features ( Agile ) as well as test changes they push into production.
Unfortunately, the "total user installs" metric was removed from the Statistics page in the Google Play Console a while back.
There is still a pretty simple way to get the total install count though (but it is admittedly a bit annoying). You can export a report that has your installs per month across the lifetime of your app, and sum all those together to get the total.
Go to "Statistics" for your app from the Sidebar
Make a new report where your metric from the first dropdown is "Installs by User"
Change the interval to "Monthly", and set your date range to be "Lifetime"
Export the report as a CSV, open it up in some spreadsheet software and do a sum for all of your downloads
But I think a better way than that is to just write a tool which fetches all of your reports programatically from the Google Cloud Buckets so you can just click 1 button and generate any reports you might need. I talk about how I built mine here if you want to check it out.
It seems like it is now possible again in some sort. In the dashboard of your app there is a section with the title "How are your KPIs performing?".
In that section there is both a graph for "New Users Acquired" and "Users lost" (if that view mode is enabled) which also shows the total amount. The total amount is for the given period, but that can be changed above the sections - if set to "Lifetime" it shows the total users acquired and users lost.
Be aware that there is a difference between users acquired/lost and install/uninstall events. Highlight the questionmark next to the titles to get the definition of users acquired/lost.
I hope the image below shows what I mean. I unfortunaly had to hide the actual data, but hope it still makes sense.