Switched from iPhone to Android and my watch is now a very expensive bracelet Buying Advice

Reply notifications is the detail to check, and it's one where you've accidentally upgraded. Some watches let you dictate or type a real reply on Android in a way they never could on the platform you left. If messaging is a big part of why you wear it, that's a meaningful improvement in your favour.

Nightly charging is the thing you'll notice most coming from where you're coming from. Anything with a colour always-on display in your budget is a one-to-two day watch. If battery matters more than screen, the memory-in-pixel displays look worse in photographs and last a week or more, and after a fortnight you genuinely stop noticing the screen.

The Android side is better on this specifically, with one caveat. Watches from phone makers tend to hold a feature or two back for their own handsets — sometimes an ECG, sometimes a body-composition thing — so a same-brand watch on a different Android phone is about 90% rather than 100%. Watches from the fitness-first brands are essentially phone-agnostic and will follow you across any change, which given what just happened to you sounds like your answer.

One practical annoyance nobody warns you about: some watch companion apps on Android get killed by aggressive battery optimisation, and your notifications quietly stop for a week until you find the toggle. If notifications go flaky after you buy, that's the first place to look rather than the watch.

Before you buy: check whether the old watch has resale value and whether your health history can be exported from the old platform. I threw away four years of data in a platform switch and it still irritates me two years later.