I watched a video that I downloaded from the internet. An icon appeared in the upper right of the screen (see screenshot). I have removed all other icons but can’t remove this one. Can someone help me remove it?
iPad, iPadOS 18
The icon indicates that your iPad is performing synchronisation - or a background download. Appearance of the icon is benign - and will disappear of its own accord when the task completes.
Yours is one of many recent reports seen since release of iPadOS 18 and 26. At present, pending confirmation by Apple, the unexpected appearance of the icon is believed to have some relationship to post-update synchronisation tasks performed by your iPad after updating to iPadOS 18/26 (such as downloading or updating Apple Intelligence LLM models) - or the icon appears while a large file 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:
The icon indicates that your iPad is performing synchronisation - or a background download. Appearance of the icon is benign - and will disappear of its own accord when the task completes.
Yours is one of many recent reports seen since release of iPadOS 18 and 26. At present, pending confirmation by Apple, the unexpected appearance of the icon is believed to have some relationship to post-update synchronisation tasks performed by your iPad after updating to iPadOS 18/26 (such as downloading or updating Apple Intelligence LLM models) - or the icon appears while a large file 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:
If you re referring to the blue oval gear icon in the upper right, there’s a sync of something running.
Off-hand, I don’t know what is getting synchronized; iCloud, or GDrive, or otherwise.
If it’s not tappable and is stuck, see if a restart clears it.
Some people have mentioned that it is an iPadOS update download. If you automatically install iPadOS updates, that might be it. Go to Settings > General > Software Update to see if a download or installation is proceeding.
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