Activity created before Application.onCreate called?

Question

We use a subclassed Application object, like this:

class MyApp : Application() {
    init {
        instance = this
    }

    ...

    companion object {
        lateinit var instance: MyApp
            private set
    }
}

...which should get initialized before any other components of the app are launched (Activities, Services, etc). And for 99.99% of our users, everything works correctly.

However, there's a crash that we see for just a few users, that looks like this:

Exception java.lang.RuntimeException:
  at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity (ActivityThread.java:4051)
  at android.app.ActivityThread.handleLaunchActivity (ActivityThread.java:4325)
  at android.app.servertransaction.LaunchActivityItem.execute (LaunchActivityItem.java:101)
  at android.app.servertransaction.TransactionExecutor.executeCallbacks (TransactionExecutor.java:135)
  at android.app.servertransaction.TransactionExecutor.execute (TransactionExecutor.java:95)
  at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage (ActivityThread.java:2574)
  at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage (Handler.java:106)
  at android.os.Looper.loopOnce (Looper.java:226)
  at android.os.Looper.loop (Looper.java:313)
  at android.app.ActivityThread.main (ActivityThread.java:8757)
  at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke
  at com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run (RuntimeInit.java:571)
  at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main (ZygoteInit.java:1067)
Caused by kotlin.UninitializedPropertyAccessException: lateinit property instance has not been initialized
  at mypackage.MyApp$Companion.getInstance (MyApp.kt:312)
  at mypackage.MyActivity.<init> (MyActivity.kt:72)
  at java.lang.Class.newInstance
  at android.app.AppComponentFactory.instantiateActivity (AppComponentFactory.java:95)
  at androidx.core.app.CoreComponentFactory.instantiateActivity (CoreComponentFactory.java:45)
  at android.app.Instrumentation.newActivity (Instrumentation.java:1328)
  at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity (ActivityThread.java:4038)

Note in the stack trace that MyActivity attempts to access MyApp.instance, but apparently it hasn't been initialized! This would imply that the Activity is getting launched before the Application class was instantiated (?)

What could be going on?