Text messages half sending

I have a friend who has an android so i cant imessage and have to use text message, but it has been acting up alot ever since i started messaging, if i send a normal text it takes 5 minutes for it to end up saying not delivered but sometimes my friend will reply and sometimes he won’t so i can’t tell if they actually went through or not, but whats weirder is that if i send a photo with text both the text and the photo send absolutely fine as if nothing happened, i just want everything to be normal.

Edit 1: i just realised my send as sms was turned off but i just turned it on but nothing changed…ill restart my iphone

Edit 2: I think it worked whoopsies i just assumed that i didn’t need send as sms turned on since i couldn’t send iMessage to android users anyway, although sometimes things work for a minute after i restart my phone then all the settings and stuff take place so I’ll update this post tomorrow