I’m still on Nova because it just works so right for me, many others I tried didn’t.

My needs are very basic

• A home screen I can place icons in specific positions (eg not forced auto sort)
• folders (drag multiple icons on top of each other to create a group/folder)
• Message count on icons, e.g my Whatsapp icon should show a little number indicating amount of new messages
• and finally, an app drawer showing all apps in a single list (without any fancy grouping)

Maybe this is normal now but years ago Nova seemed to be the only one that offered all these basic features together