My Garmin 935 is waterproof, has an always on display, shows smartphone notifications, charges once a week, and has worked for over a year. If apple or Fitbit had this, I’d go back. Had multiple fit bits and they all broke in 6 months. Had an Apple Watch, but it needed to be charged every day, wasn’t waterproof, and display turned off. Apple has improved on 2 of those but it still needs every day charging.
I would put garmin last software, but the other hardware features more than make up for it.
Ex Garmin employee:
The amount of 1st party software in those watches is astounding. And it almost all gets processed on-watch.
The 3rd party app support is laughably poor, but the APIs are there. ConnectIQ apps are written in their own language (MonkeyC, which is kinda hard to use), which hinders adoption, and are generally slow and feature-poor.
But the good thing for Garmin is that the 1st party software more than makes up for the lack of 3rd party support. The music-enabled watches (eg FR645) have Spotify support, GPS, and Bluetooth music, last for an eon, and are hardy as all hell.
Seriously, I know that these always-on displays don't look as nice as an LCD, but I value battery life more. If there were WearOS device that had this type of display to make them last longer than a day or two I'd consider it, mostly for Google Pay and the ability to use Spotify without my phone.
Plus it really sucks to wait for the lag on wrist-raise (or the false alarms) to be able to tell the time. With the Garmin, glance at it to get the time; no wrist movement foppery. Edit: BTW, some of the WearOS watches now have effectively 2 displays: a always-on lcd with great battery life for the basics and the fancy backlit lcd underneath for everything else: one example is Mobvoi, which has funding from Google and thus hopefully isn't fly-by-night. Edit2: https://wearos.google.com/#find-your-watch .
I would put garmin last software, but the other hardware features more than make up for it.