The two biggest drone delivery services agree on the payload and disagree on everything after the flight

Two companies fly more delivery drones than anyone else, on opposite sides of the world, with no shared supplier and no shared regulator. They have converged on the same payload: Amazon's MK30 is certified for 5 lb (2.3 kg), and Meituan's fourth-generation aircraft is quoted at 2.5 kg in China and 2.4 kg in the export version sold under the Keeta Drone brand. Amazon says that ceiling covers roughly 60% of what its customers most often buy. The agreement ends there. Amazon's drone descends over a customer's garden and releases the parcel from a low hover onto the lawn — which works in American suburbs and nowhere else. Meituan's flies a fixed corridor between towers and ends at a pick-up cabinet, because in a high-rise district there is no lawn and no legal way to drop anything. Each design encodes the city it was built for. The consequences show up in the range figures, and they are the reverse of what the technology suggests. Amazon's aircraft covers a 12 km radius, roughly 450 km2 from one site; Meituan's covers 5 km fully loaded. The Chinese drone is the more constrained machine on paper and the busier one in practice: Meituan had passed 900,000 real customer orders by May 2026, flying scheduled routes rather than waiting for demand. That is also why the aircraft Meituan announced on 21 May matters more than its specification sheet suggests. The M-Drone 4L Winch does not land at all: it hovers and lowers the package on a cable, which means a destination no longer needs a cabinet, floor space, power or a landlord's signature. Payload rises to 4.5 kg and range to 20 km fully loaded, and Meituan states the noise was cut specifically so the aircraft can fly at night. Remove the cabinet and the Chinese model stops being a city-centre special case. The remaining difference between the two services is then not the drone but the paperwork: Amazon needs a separate environmental review and authorisation for every new site, while Meituan is recruiting third-party operators to fly its network under a licence issued for the country as a whole.