Make Dev Mode Annotations Visible to All

Dear dev mode team,

PLEASE allow viewers to see annotations notes. We are pushing for designer and develop adoption of annotation notes but with the current permissions, it falls flat.

Scenario:

As a designer, I hand-off designs to engineering on a call and share figma with all the beautiful interaction, content and functionality notes. I go on vacation. While away the PM runs a testing party on the new feature/changes and can’t see the annotation notes so they miss something/make their best guess and ship it. 😱

I’ve been adding annotations for the last 2 months only to today learn my devs have never been able to see them because they don’t have full or dev seats. That’s insane to paywall this feature and not explain it at all. So much wasted time and effort for something they can’t even access. Very disappointed this is paywalled. 😠

I just learned that viewers cannot see the annotations created using the new Annotation feature. Most of our developers have viewer permissions so this restriction makes the feature useless to us. Furthermore, the designers had to find it out the hard way, we had to delete all annotations and write new ones. It would have been helpful to know it before we used it everywhere. 

+1 for me. Super annoying not everyone is able to see simple annotations. This makes this otherwise great feature totally useless sadly enough…

+1. Common. Make READ for free, and WRITE paid. Otherwise I can use my own components and you did not have to bother adding it.

+1 - I already had components for adding annotations, and just wasted 3 hours adding annotations only to find out no one can see them. Make READ for free, and WRITE paid. I will never use this if the people that need to view these cant even see them. Useless feature. 

Switching back to my own components while being happy for 2 months. Nice Adobe move Figma, you’re just exactly like the thing we hate.

This is a stupid limitation. This completely disincentivizes using the feature to better communicate with my partners that don’t rely on Figma. Why wouldn’t I just use my own annotation component.

Seems like Annotations are now limited to Dev and Full users. This is disruptive and problematic, and I would like you to reconsider this.

When a designer is creating work and adding annotations, they should not have to think about what Figma seat type each potential viewer of the file has. Annotations could take a range of forms and could provide important messages to product managers, front end engineers, server engineers, marketers, content managers or anyone else.

Don’t require a designer to think about Figma seats and your revenue model whenever they are simply trying to get their work done and communicate clearly with their collaborators. And don’t force us to upgrade users from View seats just to read our notes — we’d sooner use a workaround.

I agree I was super excited to tell my BA team they can see the annotations and write stories just to find out they cannot see them. Now we are going back to creating annotations into screen shots. Super waste of time and posting to confluence pages. UGHHHHH!!!!