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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

Luca21
New Member
March 26, 2026

I’ve stumbled upon this bug/disappointment/obstacle a few weeks ago… so thanks Figma for making annotations visibile to all ASAP, please let us know! 

Alexander01
New Member
March 30, 2026

Hi ​@djv, any update on this? Making annotations is a perfect feature for all parties (customer, PO, Scrum Master, Developer, UX Designer,...) involved. BUT the fact that it is only visible for Full or DEV license is absolutely blocking our collaboration. We cannot get licenses for all project participants. I know you want to earn money but PLS, think about making the feature available for all. People will continue buying your product because it is great!    

Aurelien_Sesmat
New Member
March 31, 2026

Hello!

I'm another person who wants annotations visible across all licenses. This would greatly facilitate communication with developers, product owners, and QA teams for our projects. We can't afford to have a separate developer chair for each person just to read information.

Please add this feature soon!

Ties
Active Member
April 1, 2026

you actually can, type in the percentage (with the %), and it will actually be allowed as value

 

Gustavo_Forster
New Member
April 21, 2026

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. 

Any news on this? Still not able for viewers to see annotations - and this was a year ago. At this point, it looks like this is a spite non-feature for non-editor seats.

Mikka_Wild
New Participant
April 28, 2026

I just ran into the same problem with my customer, very annoying and not good for business.

Dev mode has more features that make it worth paying for (for devs, not PMs etc.!).

Annotations should be visible to viewing stakeholders, just like comments. The connected properties are not even necessary and maybe we could even distinguish between annotations relevant for Viewers and Developers with the categories.

Vera12
New Participant
April 30, 2026

Please, Figma, solve this asap! We have been waiting for over a year

Rodrigo da Costa
New Participant
April 30, 2026

Not only do they not care about what we need and won't fix it, but they did the same thing with comments on Figma Make, which only paid accounts can comment on.

In the world of Figma's time, our companies don't have PMs (Product Managers), POs (Product Owners), etc.

Rodrigo da Costa
New Participant
May 2, 2026

Not only do they not care about what we need and won't fix it, but they did the same thing with comments on Figma Make, which only paid accounts can comment on.

In the world of Figma's time, our companies don't have PMs (Product Managers), POs (Product Owners), etc.

time = team

JoQeVIS
New Member
May 6, 2026

The annotation feature is super useful and makes files more legible. It doesn’t make sense to hide this from regular users such as PO, Marketing people etc. 

Or please instead of having person-centered seats, make it file-centered and files can have a dev mode available, and we pay for a number of files so that teams with a lot of turnover on the dev team can still follow up easily.