Make Dev Mode Annotations Visible to All

I’m quite upset about this as well. On March 31, annotations were visible to everyone no matter the seat. I was really excited because that meant me and my team didn’t have to use 3rd party, buggy, slow, clunky annotation plugins anymore. We need annotations to be visible for everyone - our org is huge and there’s no way everyone on the product and development teams are going to have Dev Mode. I just found out this morning that they are no longer visible without a design or dev seat, so all of the annotations I made for my PMs in early April are no longer serving their purpose. 😡

Same here, we need the annotations also for ‘View only’ users as our PMs, QAs and other stakeholders cannot see them. Please take into serious account this otherwise the feature is pretty unusable.
thanks

Can you please extend the annotation feature to regular visitors as well? Not only designers are interested in them. My business stakeholders also need to be able to read them. Many thanks!

+1 to make annotations visible to all. Otherwise they can’t be used..

+1 PLEASE allow annotations for anyone. My PLMs will need to see these and it's ridiculous to add this many licenses. 

+1 for making annotations visible to viewers. We cannot use the feature as is since we need to do custom annotations for viewers now and won’t be doing double the work.

+1 ANNOTATIONS VIEW FOR ALL! It’s frustrating after spending so time making the annotations to find out that they don’t work for all :(

The annotations feature is nice, but it’s pretty frustrating that you’ve chosen to only allow editors and developers access to them.

I frequently have a need to share annotations with other stakeholders (developers, support, other product managers and designers). By implementing them in the way you have, you’ve excluded product managers with view access from seeing my annotations. Most of the PMs I work with only have viewer licences which means they are unable to see them.

My alternatives are that I use Comments instead of Annotations (which is a misuse of Comments for developer and interaction notes IMO) or I spin my own and make components of them.

Please make annotations visible to all users; not just editors and developers.

Please allow annotations for viewer licenses. It is such an amazing feature for sending extra notes to non-designers about how to implement. After spending so much time setting them up all over my designs, I just found out my team cannot read them!! Now I need to go back and un-do all that work and put text notes back in.

I completely agree—viewers must be able to see annotations. If this isn't a bug, then it's an extremely short-sighted decision, possibly a misguided attempt at monetization.

As someone working for a SaaS company, most of my viewers are internal stakeholders—sales teams, product managers, and executives—none of whom are developers. Expecting them to become developers just to fully understand a project is absurd. And for those working with external clients, this issue is even more frustrating. Under the current setup, you'd have to grant a client developer access just so they can see project annotations, which makes no sense.

While component-based annotations and comments provide a workaround, they are a poor substitute. This approach is frustrating, but at least it doesn’t result in additional charges just to let people see how something is supposed to function. Restricting annotation creation to full and developer subscriptions is understandable, but limiting visibility for viewers? That’s a serious misstep that results in a frustrating and inefficient experience for Figma users.