the data on an apple watch doesn't belong to the watch, if that makes sense. everything stored on an apple watch is basically a temporary copy of data stored on the iphone it's paired to, and the iphone copy is authoritative. this is reasonable but like anything it has tradeoffs.

my phone restored and now it's “upgrading” (apple force you to upgrade the ios version when restoring so i guess it has to do some migration stuff) and… huh, my watch is also doing something??? did my phone do this? does that mean it re-paired or what???

‪hello from my restored iphone! incredibly, i was apparently wrong about the apple watch? perhaps apple must have changed how this works: it seems to have automatically re-paired synced the last two weeks of fitness data back to my phone. nothing lost. i'm impressed!‬

@hikari Apple Watch sync is very good these days. I swap them about once a year and they slowly went from “goodbye all fitness data” to “you’re missing the 15 minutes you had it off your wrist”

@saagar @hikari Is that a model thing or a watchOS version thing? At some point I’m going to have to replace my series 3, and I don’t want to lose my 6 year move streak

@h0m54r @hikari I would guess watchOS

@saagar @h0m54r my watch definitely didn't have these magical sync capabilities a year ago, they must have improved the os