Non-published components don't receive updates

Hey everyone, I’ve changed the category to “Share an Idea”. I’ll check this with the team, this looks like a feature request because components need to be published to receive updates.

Apologies for the late response! This is indeed a feature request. If you maintain a library of styles, components, and variables, you may need to unpublish a library. This means anyone using this library will no longer be able to access the library or receive updates to its styles, components, and variables.

I’m not sure this addresses any of the previous comments tho? Are we just stuck with using neon emojis to differentiate between libraries in the assets panel? Their poor eyeballs.

We have run into this same issue as we are building out a Design System. We have wanted to have more nested components but hide some of the nested components. We do this to keep in more parity with engineering. It would be nice to see a fix from Figma on this. Please vote.

I also think this needs to be a prioritized feature! Wild that it doesn’t work as expected.

@Gayani_S I disagree that this is a feature request and not a bug. The feature being used is “Hide when publishing” not “Do not publish”. As everyone has noted the expectation is that the updates will publish, but the component will be hidden inside the assets panel. This expectation is in line with how variables work when they are hidden from publishing but are referenced in another published variable.

The team can say that Product/UX didn’t set that as a requirement so the eng. team didn’t code it that way, but missing requirements are still bugs. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter. This “bughancement” needs to be fixed/enhanced as it hampers complex design systems, and forces a workaround of having to publish every hidden component then re-hide them to get the update to happen, which is tedious and can cause side effects.

Example of how variables show what is updating and that the changes do update even though the root variable is set to “Hide for publishing”

Adding to the list, we are, of course, facing the same issue in our team. I also think, that we are not talking feature here, but bug, as the “Publish changes” workflow suggests, that changes to the base components are actually published.

(ACTUAL FEATURE REQUEST FOLLOWING)
Further, I would like to stress the need for being able to swap base components with others without having them visible in the main Assets pane. As soon as they are hidden, you are not able to swap to them, if they are fundamentally different. We use, for instance, custom made specification markers, which provide a visual representation of a color, a font, a shadow and spell out their token name next to them. The color, font and shadow blocks are different components as they have different properties but we allow for swapping between them on the main marker component. Now, I have to publish those to be able to swap between them, which I don’t want. I want them to be scoped to this parent component only and not retrievable from the Assets pane.

How is this not fixed years later!!!

Clearly within my personal Top 3 of the most annoying figma issues as a design system maintainer.
Components should be “published” but not listed to not break nested components that rely on sub or .base_components you don’t want to see in the assets panel.

Dear Figma,

Please, do something about it. We beg you. 

Thank you.