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aaronjellis
New Participant
July 16, 2024

Make Dev Mode Annotations Visible to All

  • July 16, 2024
  • 214 replies
  • 6670 views

Please make Dev Mode Annotations visible by all roles, not just Full Dev Mode seats. This can become costly for users needing context but not all the other dev-mode features.

Here’s the scenario:
We have a dashboard, with cards showing a customer’s account status. This status can be mapped from multiple back-end statuses, to show just one front-end status. For example, any of the following could be mapped to a single status known to the customer as “Completed”: canceled, terminated, sold, complete, etc.

This is something that the developer needs to reference, but then also the PM needs to reference in writing tickets (who doesn’t need full dev-mode access), the QE needs to reference for testing automations, and various other individuals on our team. Placing it in a comment makes it less clearly attached to the specific piece of the design, and requires us to keep documentation dispersed among different tools (Jira, Confluence, Figma etc).

Simply making Dev mode annotations visible to viewers would make for far less duplicate documentation or added dependency on other documentation tools for a designer and team.

214 replies

Meme Betadam
New Member
August 26, 2025

Annotations are useless unless they are visible to viewers. I can understand measurements only being available in dev mode, but annotations are useful for PMs and other members of the team.

adrian_n
New Participant
August 26, 2025

Why isn’t there an update on this topic? What else are we, the users (and «sponsors» of Figma in that sense) supposed to do to bring attention to this unacceptable situation?

On top of the fact that it appears suspicious to introduce a new tool/feature that allows users to add measurements and annotations but not inform anyone using it that they won’t be visible to viewers, it’s also completely unusable this way.

So, Figma ( ​@djv  ?) , please listen to your paying users, who are responsible for the absurd amounts of license fees paid every month, and make the annotations visible to all users with viewing permissions.

adrian_n
New Participant
August 26, 2025

Please ​@djv as stated in the other thread: could you please ensure to pass this request(s) on immediately and provide us with an update on the situation? The situation is not only annoying and frustrating, but also not acceptable.

Jesse_Wallace
New Participant
August 27, 2025

@adrian_n and everyone else, you can probably just forget about this and file it under all of the QOL fixes that Figma will never actually do. They are too focused on IPO and AI to deliver the features that users truly need.

But hey, we have Figma Buzz now!

Rebecca Kelleher
New Member
August 27, 2025

I’m still disturbed, disrupted, pickled and peeved about this. Come on Figma! Please fix this!!! +1,000,000,000

Adam Youngers
New Member
August 27, 2025

+1 | How has this not been fixed?  I’m back to using Axure because of this seemingly obvious oversight on Figma’s part.  Wires are useless if you can’t provide context.

Tara_Price2
Active Member
August 27, 2025

Because of this limitation in annotation, we’re no longer using this incomplete feature and we’re moving this communications outside of the Figma’s suite. T

Zoli
Figma Ambassador
Figma Ambassador
August 28, 2025

has this been resolved since?

adrian_n
New Participant
August 29, 2025

has this been resolved since?

@Zoli  Unfortunately not, that’s why we should keep this thread alive.

Zoli
Figma Ambassador
Figma Ambassador
August 29, 2025

has this been resolved since?

@Zoli  Unfortunately not, that’s why we should keep this thread alive.


in this case, bump