Make Dev Mode Annotations Visible to All

The most infuriating part of this is that when the feature was introduced 2 months ago, it was visible by all. Was there an announcement that the feature would be restricted? I was just in a design review with a dev team where I found out, live on their screen, that my extensive annotations were impossible for them to view. I agree with others that this is less than useless: if I knew the annotations could not be viewed, I would have annotated the way I always have before.

Even if my org wanted to pay for developer seats, there’s no time to coordinate that in sprint. They need the annotations now. I shouldn’t even be writing this now, I need to hurry up and transfer all of my annotations out of Annotations, so my dev team can continue working.

I am so profoundly frustrated and disappointed with Figma right now.

This is awful. I just spent a full day annotating 2 different files with hundreds of contextual notes, so not for development, but for stakeholders, copywriting team, and more - just to learn only edit/dev see annotations? 

https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/20774752502935-Add-measurements-and-annotate-designs

“Anyone with a Full or a Dev seat and at least “can view” access to a file can view measurements and annotations”. What kind of a purposefully false-advertising language is this?! Especially since the feature isn’t locked behind a dev mode switch, it’s next to comments WHICH ARE AVAILABLE TO ALL. 

Horrible. Useless. Frustrating. Disappointing. 

Every few days you manage to surprise me negatively, lately. Actively looking for alternatives now, no joke.

I just today realized the same. At least 5 different projects that I worked on in parallel, loaded with annotations, now turned out to be hidden behind a paywall….

Unbelievable how unclear and misleading you were about introduction and further improvements of that tool, shame.

This is fcking ridiculous. I’d spent hours to specify design parts and behaviors for my Manager and Stakeholders, and I was shocked when I saw on my manager’s screen only edit/dev seats can see the annotations. Purchasing a full seat just to see these annotations is frustrating, and watching Figma transforming from a free product into one that tries to invent ways to make money from even the tiniest features is deeply disappointing.

AGREED!

I came here for the first time just to say this! I was so excited about not having to manually set up annotations anymore—being able to click directly on an element and add an annotation with a label is a huge time-saver.

However, it's a major limitation that people with “View Only” access can’t see them.

Our backend developers and QA engineers are in Figma all the time, but they only need view access. That said, they still need to see annotations like notes, tooltips, and links just as much as our frontend developers do. Upgrading all of them to dev seats would be prohibitively expensive.

This feature would be so much more useful if annotations were visible to view-only users too.Needless to say, we won’t be able to use the annotations feature till it is available to all users. 

This feature would be a game changer if everyone including those who are view access only, we have so many people who need to be able to view annotations but this feature is essentially unusable now since the entire team needs to be able to view them, not just designers and devs.

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. ​

 

I’m also sooo frustrated to only find out about this now! I spent hours writing annotations for our devs who had View seats only to find out today that they can’t see them! And how did I find out? The devs kept asking questions in the past couple of days when the answers to them were already written in the annotations.  So I was already starting to wonder if annotations can only be seen by me. Then LO AND BEHOLD! After searching on google, this thread came up.

Figma, please do something about this. It’s ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS to only let Dev and Editor seats see annotations.

The problem we’re having is that annotations don’t show up for paid editors when the file is set to view only. They’re only visible in Dev Mode.

This contradicts the behavior specified in Figma’s own documentation:

Anyone with a Full or a Dev seat and at least can view access to a file can view measurements and annotations

We have the exact same problem! Our PM is not able to see annotations, which is crucial as that’s where we add some of the specifications of the design.