Not the same person but I’m using Nova on my pixel, for starters icon pack support is a must to me, and then Nova lets me tweak things on a granular level, so I end up with much cleaner looking launcher, no search bar, no scrolling bar, customizable background color, text color etc and that’s just a few advantages it offers.

Apple deserves all the money it can get, poor startup can’t survive on competitive pricing forever.

Why wouldn’t they ?

This will outlive us, no matter the platform.