How Do You Know When Friendships Start?

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Is there a certain point where an acquaintance becomes a friend, and how do people typically maintain such relationships?

Probably once you hang out regularly enough. However, I've always had trouble with that transition from meeting someone to becoming a friend or boyfriend.

If someone likes me enough to want to be friends, they usually ask for my mobile phone number and/or want to meet up for coffee or something. Because I have had so much social rejection in the past which still hurts today, I generally don't suggest things first because I fear being rejected again, or accused of being "clingy" or "annoying" even when I'm not at all. So I express friendliness in other ways like sharing banter and engaging in small talk or conversation, and hope that they will pick up on the hints and want to form a friendship (unless they have social anxiety as well, but I usually can sense if someone else has social anxiety).

When you go out and do things together outside of a structured environment (for me, friends from Toastmasters, church and tennis)

Back in the old days (up to as recently as 5 or 6 years ago), my friends were people whom I talked with frequently on the phone, in addition to seeing them in structured environments pertaining to our common interests. Only very rarely did I get together in person with people outside of a structured environment.

Unfortunately for me these days, it seems that most people don't like to talk on the phone anymore. Back in the old days it was common for people, especially women, to talk to their friends on the phone. These days it seems like almost everyone except me has developed phone-phobia, preferring to communicate either in person or via text, but nothing in-between. This has made it much more time-consuming and all-around less convenient for me to have the kinds of intimate conversations that can deepen a friendship.

Be that as it may, friendship (at least in the modern Western world; perhaps it's different in other cultures?) has many different possible levels and degrees of intensity, with no clear, ritualized transitions between the levels.