Apple's made privacy a fairly large part of their value offering recently.
The problem is that that's mostly marketing smoke and mirrors. They define privacy as not giving your data to third parties (who aren't subcontracted with them), not actually refusing to collect in-depth data or link it to your personal identity. There have been a number of pieces of evidence released recently that show that they actually collect as much if not more data about you then Google does, and tend to ignore your privacy settings.
The amount of effort required to root a phone hard enough to where apps couldn't stalk me wasn't helping.
Depending on your phone, you could use GrapheneOS (which is super easy to set up compared to rooting and basically the best security and privacy you can get in any smartphone) or CalyxOS. Both easier (and more effective) than rooting, and certainly better than Apple.
"Nova" means "awesome" or "amazing" kinda