Figma makes 200 fixes and improvements to Dev Mode

> I bet Adobe would like to back out of the deal too

They don't, they already killed their Adobe Xd[0]. Even if it was still around, it was in a different league.

So they very much betting on the deal, they don't want to be out of the UI/UX space entirely.

[0] - The Silent End of Adobe XD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36637055

That's not been my impression as a designer. Outside of HN, I've not seen anybody talk about switching to Penpot. My team even looked at it and concluded it was several evolutionary steps from being an option. It's not a viable replacement for Figma yet. To be clear, I'd love it if it were, because I want competition in a space Adobe is trying to monopolize, I just don't feel like Penpot is providing that pressure at this point.

I very much doubt they are worried about an obscure open source project.

$25/mth seems like an egregious price for such an unhelpful feature. I understand it will get better, but at this point... I can't imagine paying more than $5/mth on top of my current price assuming it was more polished.

Maybe I'm not the target market. I can transcribe visuals to CSS and HTML fairly automatically due to so many years of doing it, and I can do it reliably and consistently in ways that fit various workflows and other challenges. I understand Figma probably wants dev mode to provide a source of truth and gradually add some show stopping features, but even then... $25 is so much. I already feel like Figma costs me more than I want to pay for it. Their pricing model is really aggressive.

Posting anonymously as I have made some investments in the design tooling space.

Overall I don't see Penpot being a realistic competitor to Figma, and I can't see this as being something that was done as a knee jerk reaction to Penpot's social success.

First, why it isn't a realistic competitor. While building everything out leveraging SVG as its main rendering engine allows for parity with code as an advantage, the inherent disadvantage it has is handling large files. For larger design teams, files often have thousands of designs and pages. Sketch has an advantage here over Figma primarily because it has a higher upper bound on possible memory that it can allocate to each file. Penpot not only has the memory restrictions Figma does (since it operates in the browser), it's also tied to the browser rendering performance of SVG, which simply wasn't designed for the scale designers operate at. It tends to get extremely slow once you have 50 or so pages in a single artboard. This means realistically, Penpot is competing for the casual design market, rather than the larger enterprise-scale design market. Figma's approach for this market has always been to use it as a top-of-funnel expansion opportunity, which is why their free tier targets these users. In general it's very hard to compete with something that is both industry-standard, and free. Penpot theoretically offers more functionality than the Figma free tier, but since it can't support the scale that Sketch/Figma does for larger files, it greatly narrows the market they're targeting. The market for users who want to build extremely advanced designs, but who also want to create extremely small files, is a narrow group.

Second, with regards to this being a knee-jerk reaction to Penpot's dev tooling, the dates just don't line up. Penpot really exploded in reaction to the Adobe acquisition announcement in late 2022, but Figma acquired a YC company known as Visly in 2021. Visly was apparently working on some design->code elements, which was really the first inkling that Figma was exploring this. It seems like this was being worked on / thought about long before Penpot took off. Given the submitter of this story appears to be Emil Sjölander, one of the Visly founders, I suspect that it's a fair assumption that Visly turned into Figma's Dev Mode feature: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/visly