My Series 9 totally fails at sleep detection and regularly claims that I am in "Deep Sleep" while I am lying there trying to get back to sleep. Instead of fixing that, they are adding sleep apnea alerts. I wish there was an alternate ecosystem that was actually competitive with Apple.
I've found that the Garmin stuff actually integrates with healthkit pretty effectively. You can't make calls on (most) of the garmin watches, but they also have 30+ day battery (and in worse case, active GPS and music playback usage 72+ hours).
But I don't want to make calls or texts or be bugged by a fitness device.
Plus, the long battery life means you can sleep with it on without thinking about or caring about charging.
It's a common issue with all health wearables because they don't have sufficient data.
When your heart rate and respiration rate are at sleep level because you just slept for four hours, but you woke up and now you're waiting to go back to sleep, there isn't much that a wrist strap can do to disambiguate.
My series 6 consistently said I had 4 minutes more sleep time than in bed time, and neither really noticeably tracked anything. Our a and Fitbit sleep tracking might not be truly accurate, but at least they’re semi plausible.
Try turning off sleep schedule and automatic sleep focus on/off. AFAIK sleep tracking uses sleep focus to determine if you try to sleep or not, it gives off false positives a lot. For example I was watching a movie, sleep focus turned on automatically at 9pm (due to my sleep schedule being set to start then), movie was boring, I had a low HR and the watch thought I was asleep. Managing sleep focus manually made the measurements pretty much spotless as I turn it on whenever I lay down to sleep and turn it off as soon as I wake up.
My sleep tracking works pretty well on my S9. It isn't perfect and there are glitches and bugs I've noticed, but overall the long term trend tends to even out and feels pretty comparative to my old Fitbit.
S6 user here, yeah sleep tracking can be dodgy. Good to know it's not a device issue. Also the OS keeps getting slightly more buggy/glitchy with every major release. I like it that I sometimes still get a new useful feature (sleep tracking wasn't this good on release) but it kinda sucks that a 4yro device is getting overall worse because of software.
Still agree, wish there was competition worth considering.