I think predictive text predates even Android and smartphones (but not exactly), when we had to press a key 3 times until specific characters appeared; called T9 and just a dictionary. Having or not having a dictionary suggestion was the difference between life and death. Now the modern smartphone has way more compute power and resources, therefore they can analyze text in more depth. It's just the logical next step to the plain and simple dictionary.

See, it isn’t new and it isn’t AI, but it’s the same line of development as modern LLMs. They’ve just rebranded existing projects and lines of development as “AI technology” to be marketable.