Ask HN: Whatever happened to the “coming wave” of delivery drones?
I don't remember where, but I read a lengthy comment from someone in the industry which said there were two main things preventing delivery drones from being a viable market:1. FAA regulations - delivery drones can't operate within X miles of an airport (technically they can, but it requires a much stricter degree of certification and compliance nobody wants to bother with)2. Drones need a landing space, so people without yards (like apartment and townhouse dwellers, who make up a lot of the population in exactly the densely populated areas where you'd want to use drones to begin with) can't be servedAnd it turns out that once you exclude "houses within X miles of an airport" and "houses without an LZ", there aren't enough customers left to make delivery drones worth it.