What does a "sorry I just saw this" text really mean?

[itsmariam]

A few weeks into quarantine, a guy sent me a text out of the blue asking how I was doing. Although I'm trying to avoid him as much as I can to get over my crush on him, I decided to reply out of politeness since we're friends. We ended up texting for about a few days since he would always think of a way to keep the conversation going. At first, he replied within 5-10 minutes but after a while he replied to one of my messages a little over a day later saying that he's sorry for replying late because he only just saw my message. I know for a fact that he's always on his phone, so I don't know why he would lie to me when he could've just told me the truth. Any idea if he really wanted to hear how I was doing, or if he was just so bored that he decided to contact me? This happened a while ago, and I've been getting over him since, but once in a while the question of why he would do that crosses my mind sometimes.

[spartan55]

Such a stupid excuse, why even worry about this since you are trying to get over him?
I don't ever have to do something stupid like explain my text response time, no one should. Did he just offer that excuse, or did you make some sort of remark about how long it took?

[itsmariam]

he offered that as his excuse, i never made any remarks about it

[spartan55]

Yeah, he's full of shit. Don't waste your time.

[In_Trance]

it means they're sorry they just saw this