How did my arrow cursor change from an arrow to a circle.
When I opened my iPad today all of a sudden there was a circle instead of an arrow as the cursor.
iPad Air, iPadOS 18
Prior to release of iPadOS 26, the on-screen cursor - seen when using a mouse or touchpad - has always been a dot, this representing the equivalent "touch" point on the iPad screen. Other than re-sizing the dot, no other options to change the shape of the cursor are available.
iPadOS 26 changed the resizable dot-cursor to a re-sizeable arrow. Similar to earlier versions of iPadOS, you cannot change the shape of the onscreen arrow-cursor.