Messages not sending photos to non iphone users

I am using iOS 18.01. Ever since I received my iPhone 16 pro max I’ve had the greatest, actually no success, difficulty sending photos or video via text to android users.

Ive been on with apple support and even reset my network settings. I have attempted turning off/on RCS and it doesn’t matter. If anything it works better with rcs turned off. But I still can’t send. I often get the message that I should turn on IMessage, yet it already is. I truly believe it’s an iOS bug that severely needs to get fixed.