Unknown Icon at top right of iPad screen
Have just noticed next to WiFi symbol at top right of screen a symbol: two white arrows in a circle on a bright blue background. Where has it come from and how do I clear it?
iPad, iPadOS 18
The icon to which you likely refer, illustrated below, 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 months. 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: