Unidentified Menu Bar iCon on iPad mini
I don't know when this icon appeared, I don't know what it signifies, and clicking on it does nothing. ????
iPad mini 6, iPadOS 18
Question marked as
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:
