At what point is an instance of the Singleton pattern created?

The creation of a Singleton pattern instance occurs at the moment of the first access to that instance if a lazy initialization method is used.

That is, the object is created upon the first call to a method that returns the Singleton instance, such as getInstance(). This allows delaying the creation of the object until it is actually needed, saving resources.

Example of lazy Singleton initialization in Android/Java:

public class Singleton {
    private static Singleton instance;

    private Singleton() {
        // private constructor
    }

    public static synchronized Singleton getInstance() {
        if (instance == null) {
            instance = new Singleton();
        }
        return instance;
    }
}

If eager initialization is used, the instance is created immediately when the class is loaded, before the first access.