Please can someone explain in terms an old person can understand what the blue icon is that’s appeared in the upper left corner of my ipad screen, not on my iPhone thank you in advance
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
iPad Air, iPadOS 18
This means your iPad is updating iPadOS in the background. You could install the update right away in Settings > General > Software Update to dismiss the icon.
In the future, you could also turn off Automatic Updates in the same spot. You'd still be notified of an update (with a badge on the Settings app) and then could choose to install it manually.
The icon indicates that your iPad is performing synchronisation. Appearance of the icon is benign - and will disappear of its own accord when the task completes.
Yours is one of many reports seen in recent weeks. At present, pending confirmation by Apple, this appearance of the icon is believed to have some relationship to post-update synchronisation tasks performed by your iPad after updating to iPadOS 18.x (such as downloading Apple Intelligence LLM models) - or the icon appears while a download is being performed as a background task.
Apple have not yet provided a definitive explanation.
Apple's documentation is often slow to catch-up with new features. Here is another status icon - that appears briefly when connecting some USB-C hubs - that Apple have yet to add to their documentation:
What does the blue icon in the upper left corner of my iPad screen mean?
