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aaronjellis
New Participant
July 16, 2024

Make Dev Mode Annotations Visible to All

  • July 16, 2024
  • 214 replies
  • 6672 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

JCubs
New Member
November 24, 2025

Yes, please! I assumed that all sees it and will now have to change all annotation to notes instead as also viewers must be able to see my notes. PLease extend the annotations too all seats!

We’re also just discovering this and are lamenting changing all the annotations back to how we used to do it.

Sean_Cooley
New Participant
November 24, 2025

This seems like a no-brainer. The annotations are useless unless all team members can see them. No company is going to give every PM/Analyst/Architect dev mode access.

 

You can keep the rest of dev mode locked behind a paywall, but for something as simple as annotations you need to let the whole team access them. Otherwise everyone will have to go back to using home-brewed components for annotation.

Vera12
New Participant
November 25, 2025

Please, Figma, this is much needed!

vincent.mcdonald
New Member
December 17, 2025

Its beyond frustrating that to view annotations you have to have a Figma license. People like BA’s and PO’s just need to see annotations but do not need to edit or review the files merely look at the designs and see the annotations to get an idea of the functionality.

 

Our organisation has many licenses as we have a large team of designers and developers all who have licenses. The annotations feature should be made viewable to people you share a file with without having to purchase a license.

 

To get around this we have created an annotations component but the built in one is so much easier to use.

 

Figma please make the new annotations feature viewable to all. I understand the licensing aspect for editing etc but to view an annotation makes no sense that you would need to purchase another license so someone can view a note.

 

 

Sara Johansson
New Member
January 14, 2026

This is what’s stopping our team from using annotations, very much needed!

Jesse_Wallace
New Participant
January 14, 2026

This is a major ball drop that it seems Figma isn’t in the slightest hurry to address.

They have been neglecting user feedback for this upgrade to the feature ever since it released. There have been a number of community posts about it. 

Too busy with AI, Make and such, I imagine.

 

Dennis_N
Power Member
January 29, 2026

Now it's clear where all the requests for dev mode from non-developers that we constantly receive are coming from 😡
By making this feature exclusively for dev mode, Figma is only hurting the adoption rate for annotations. Anyone who realizes that these are not visible to viewers will avoid them and go back to simple sticky notes. But it's no fun to switch back from annotations to sticky notes after a year of unknowingly using them 😡
Another downsite: Within an enterprise company org admins are not even able to stop editors from using annotations so this is an ongoing issue. All we can do is to make users aware.

SiSha
New Member
March 2, 2026

Why aren't you (Figma) responding to users? This feature would help us a lot, but not if you hide it behind a paywall. Is this feature really that money-making for you?

Yarome
New Member
March 4, 2026

I just realized too late that this works like this and I had to revert all my annotations. Please, if you’re not making viewers add annotations at least make it so we can show them to viewers at least. I’ve had to take SCREENSHOTS from the annotations and paste them into the design instead of actually using them in their intended way, making my job harder to maintain in the long run. I’m a paying user and I don’t understand why I must search for a workaround for this, when I’m paying precisely for my workflow to be easier than using old software.

Rebecca Kelleher
New Member
March 7, 2026

Hey @aaronjellis, thanks for the feedback!

We’ll pass this onto the Dev Mode team for future consideration.

Is this anywhere on the roadmap? I’m still needing this functionality.