Make Dev Mode Annotations Visible to All

I was going to praise how neat the new Annotation feature is, when I realized the content is only visible to Dev Mode accounts. Are you serious?

I understand you want to limit creating annotations to certain seat types, but viewing annotations should be a viewer-level feature. Come on Figma, there are better ways to convince your users to pay for a subscription. This is such a crooked move.

I was so happy to see annotations in the Editor view this week, but the value quickly disappeared after realizing that only other editors or team members with dev mode could see them.

Another misstep by Figma, who have got into a pattern of releasing much requested functionality, only to lock making it actually usable behind paywalls that are just too high for the majority of businesses. 

The developers who have dev mode on our team get great value from it, but we have so many other team members (PM, QAs, stakeholders, etc) who review designs. Paying an extra $25/mo/person just for them to see the annotations is extortionate. 

Please Figma, review this policy. At the very least, allow members with the new “Colab” role to be able to see annotations.

I came to this forum as a first time poster.. just to say this. I understand access but the trust of useful features being blocked behind paywalls is concerning. The success of these types of prototyping tools was that they are able to be shared with “non” designers. Also as someone else said.. devs are expensive.. they already need a lot of tooling.. their time is expensive.. asking an engineering manager to pay for a historical “design” tool is laughable. The engineers that use dev mode would just write their own code so now they are paying to see my specs. Please don’t be so greedy, it’s showing. To make this post productive.. if you won’t consider making annotations open to all.. could you at least visually treat “comments” similar to the way you’re approaching annotations.

I’m frustrated because I just spent time annotating and understanding this new feature.. I expected to lead a mtg with my team using this new feature.. only to realize it was not available to the team during the demo.

Please allow annotations to be visible for all. My team is having a hard time to explain all the changes to PM/PO/Stakeholders.

I was so excited when I saw the popup announcing this feature. I immediately started adding annotations with notes/questions for various stakeholders across my file. I sent them the link to the file, waited for feedback…

...and very quickly realized that none of them could actually see the annotations I’d left because they require a full seat to view. 😐

So now I have to move all the details from the annotations into the old annotation components I was using, which aren’t as elegant or adaptable as the Figma ones, but at the very least can be seen by all the people who need the information in them, none of whom have or need the rights of a paid seat.

Figma, PLEASE make these annotations visible to anyone with access to the file. If you want to paywall creating them, sure, but without the ability to be seen by the majority of the people in the file they’re absolutely useless.

Hey All, thank you for flagging this! 

The team confirmed that this isn’t expected behavior. Anyone with a Full or a Dev seat and at least can view access to a file should be able to view measurements and annotations. 

Our team is working on a fix, and we’ll provide an update as soon as we can. 

wdym? others can’t see my annotations? that’s cruel! 

It could be better if we can toggle the visibility of each annotation. Like something: I can see where it has some annotation but this only shows up when I pass mouse over. To clear our documentation

+1 for annotaions for everybody! It’s core feature, but it’s stupid to buy dev for it.

I just spent an hour adding annotations to my designs and circulating specs with my team, only to learn that my team couldn’t see them. If annotations are solely for me, then this should be more clear in the Figma interface. My managers have View seats, and do not need Edit or Dev seats. 

As of this moment, I am completely confused about who sees annotations, what seat they need, and what the intent is. The annotations button appears in the regular interface view, which leads me to believe that it’s unrelated to Dev mode’s annotations.

This is very frustrating. ​