Make Dev Mode Annotations Visible to All

+♾️ to annotations being viewable. 

Hey Figma fam 👋 

I totally understand why you are trying to feature gate the Annotations, I’m sure it does forecast an opportunity to make Millions of dollars. (I’m having similar situations in my org too 😅)

BUT the real problem you’re actually solving is worth WAYYYYY more than the millions. And that is the “joy of collaboration in the team”. Whilst that sounds cheesy, it does have a direct impact on livelihood both psychologically and professionally.

Please, I urge you to consider NOT to restrict viewing to specific cohorts. It not only makes it hard to have conversations to improve design processes within teams, it also puts designers in a vulnerable position where there is a lot of burnout, and stress. 

TBH I really don’t mind paying extra for it, because heck yeah it’s a fkn amazing feature and kudos to the amazing people who have built that. Idk, maybe increase the overall charge for teams who can afford it? It’s just that when it’s feature gated to a specific kind of seat, the conversations are harder to have and teams lose interest quickly :( 

PS: This is my first post in the community. Nice to be here with y’all 🥳

Λbi 

Annotations are the perfect tool for collaborating between the seats of Figma… not another privledged tool for the few.

As noted by others, annotations are very useful as we’ve been using our own via custom built components previously, but as there are SIGNIFICANTLY more Viewers that need access to these than just designers and DEVS in a SaaS environment….

Naaaauuurrrrrr i just spent 20 minutes adding annotations, proudly share the link to my free-seat viewers. Please make this widely availableeeee

+1 to this request. Our team relies on Dev Mode annotations to capture key implementation details and design rationale, but limiting visibility to paid Dev Mode seats breaks the workflow:

• Designers, PMs and QA can’t see the notes, so context gets lost and we end up duplicating comments elsewhere.

• Review links shared with external stakeholders show “empty” screens, which creates confusion and slows sign-off.

• Switching roles just to read an annotation is friction the product shouldn’t impose.

Please make annotations visible (or at least toggle-able) for all collaborators so they can serve as a single source of truth across disciplines. This change would dramatically boost adoption of Dev Mode in larger product teams.

+100 on this. Hiding annotations behind the Dev-Mode paywall turns a collaboration feature into a silo. In a normal sprint our designers leave implementation notes, PMs add business context, and QA flags edge cases—yet the moment any of them can’t read an annotation the whole chain of trust snaps and we’re back to screenshots in Slack.

Annotations need to be visible (even if read-only) to anyone who can open the file. Until that’s possible, we can’t roll Dev Mode out to the broader org, and that’s a missed win for Figma and for cross-functional teams like ours. Please prioritise this fix!

Huge fan of the new Annotations release—it’s headed in the right direction—but a few pain-points are blocking full-team adoption:

• Visibility: PMs, QA and execs need to read annotations without a Dev-Mode seat. Duplicating notes elsewhere just to keep everyone in the loop defeats the purpose. forum.figma.com

• Re-usability: Custom categories don’t persist across files, so we rebuild the same taxonomy every sprint.

• Discoverability: Quick keyboard shortcut + a toggle in Prototype view would make annotations feel native to everyday reviews.

Solve those three and I’ll be a happy customer again :-)

Okay so I think I might be running into this bug now as well. However since it’s 3 months on from the original question and it appears that this is indeed a `bug` that someone with `can view` access should be able to see annotations. 

So do we have a fix yet or is it still on a backlog? 

It's not a bug... it's a paywall.

​@djv wrote that to read the annotation, the user needs: "Full or a Dev seat and at least can view access to a file."

In other words, the feature could be released to everyone immediately (especially since, when they launched, it was already accessible to everyone), but they chose not to do so.

For some reason, with strong competitors arriving to completely transform the way designers create interfaces, they think frustrating us with meaningless decisions in an attempt to make a few bucks is the best option.

p.s.: However, I think the idea of ​​paying to WRITE annotations is acceptable.

Omg Rodrigo, thank you for clarifying that. I totally misread that!!!

So jumping on the bandwagon and saying that paying to SEE annotations is unacceptable. This is so annoying and now I have to completely rearchitect my approach to current work. 😑