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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

Figmashley
New Participant
September 4, 2025

It’s absolutely bonkers to discover that annotations I’ve been adding to designs, tagged with ‘Development’, aren’t even visible in Dev Mode, rendering the entire feature pointless 🤯 This shouldn’t be restricted to certain seats. Back to adding annotations as stickies on the artboard. Following for updates.

September 4, 2025

Showstopper currently… Please consider this thread

Marcelo_Venturotti
New Member
September 4, 2025

+1 yes, figma annotations viewable to all!

Piny
New Member
September 4, 2025

There is no point in using this damn feature if others cant see the damn annotations!

Jenn Tran
New Member
September 10, 2025

+1 as well! My team has been using the annotation feature for a while only to find out that MOST PEOPLE could not see any notes we intended to show everyone including PMs… so frustrating! 

Josh1107
New Member
September 11, 2025

Another bump for this. 

Johnny_Morse
New Member
September 12, 2025

Letting our clients see annotations is incredibly important for getting alignment on designs. Adding to the hundreds of others requesting this feature be open.

Wawa
New Participant
September 15, 2025

It seems like such a risk to limit visibility of annotations to certain users. It’s a neat feature but I don’t see how this is useful in any way for larger organisations where a good amount of viewers have no need to have a seat.

Rodrigo da Costa
New Participant
September 18, 2025

Yeah... they just don't care about what we need... the post was created on July 16, 2024… 

Mario_Noble
New Member
September 22, 2025

Figma is first and foremost a communication tool. Let us communicate with everyone. Annotations is a key part of this. Paywalling this feature behind a dev or full license is clearly a way to try to drive us towards getting more dev licenses. However, that really leaves a bad taste given this is central to the value prop of creating designs.