How does the drone identify apartment 5b from 4c?
Most balconies like that in my area (Omaha) have another balcony on the next floor up in roughly the same size and shape. How reliable are the flight algorithms when dealing with cielings? How does that affect airflow?
What happens when a drone gets the wrong balcony?
What happens when a drone delivery is canceled because of patio furniture, potted plants, incorrect patio dimension from the local record keepers or whatever other problem with a private landing platform?
None of these are insurmountable, they just haven't been surmounted yet.
Doesn't help with complex patio furniture though, and ceilings are a genuinely hard problem. (Most apartments in Seattle are like that too.)
It could have tiny legs and the actual target area could be a foot above the ground and it could be a net (so the wind the drone makes blows through harmlessly). Then it can catch a package dropped from a few feet.
Amazon, you have my written permission to use this idea and sell me this product.
Go out on the balcony with a phone app that prompts you to take pictures of the view in all directions. It sends these along with GPS coordinates to Amazon.
Drone flies to GPS coordinates and then descends until it's views 'match' those in the pictures you took.