How to change the cursor on iPad?

Date 25/11/2023
Category
Apple Blog, Apple How to?, Apple iPad Blog
Tags, ,
How to change the cursor on iPad?

 

Customizing the cursor on your iPad can enhance your user experience and add a personal touch to your device. Here’s a guide on how to change the cursor appearance and behavior to suit your preferences.

Transform your iPad experience by changing the cursor!

iPads running iPadOS 13 and later versions introduced cursor support, offering enhanced functionality and customization options. However, at that time, the ability to change the cursor appearance or use custom cursors directly on iPads wasn’t a feature natively provided by Apple. The cursor on iPad typically appears as a small circle or pointer, and while its size and behavior can be adjusted in the settings, changing its appearance or using custom cursors wasn’t officially supported within the iPadOS system settings.

Nevertheless, users can indirectly alter the cursor experience in a few ways:

  1. Accessibility Settings: iPadOS offers accessibility features that can modify the appearance and behavior of the cursor to some extent. To access these settings:
    • Go to “Settings” on your iPad.
    • Tap on “Accessibility.”
    • Select “Pointer Control” or “Touch” settings, depending on your iPad’s version and settings layout.
    • Here, you may find options to adjust cursor size, color, and highlighting.
  2. Third-Party Apps: Some third-party apps available in the App Store might provide limited options for customizing the cursor appearance or using alternative cursors. These apps may offer features to change the color, size, or shape of the cursor within their own interface, but these changes might not be applicable system-wide or work across all apps.

Addressing issues with pointer size and other troubleshooting matters

Pointer size and other issues on iPadOS can be troublesome for users. The first step in troubleshooting these problems is making sure your device is running the latest operating system. After that, a force restart may help restore the normal settings on your iPad. To do this without a Home button, quickly press and release the Volume Up button followed by the Volume Down button, and then press and hold the Power button until your iPad restarts. For iPads with a Home button, press and hold both the Home and Top buttons together until the Apple logo appears.

If more severe measures are necessary, you can place your device in Recovery Mode which will help to diagnose or repair any issues incurred by updating or restoring from a backup file. Doing so will erase all data from your device so it should only be used as a last resort after all other solutions have been exhausted. If you need assistance entering Recovery Mode, please reference Apple’s support page for instructions on how to do so using iTunes or Finder depending on your computer’s operating system.

Are there any third-party apps available that offer custom cursor options?

Apple’s iPadOS doesn’t inherently support extensive customization of the mouse pointer or cursor control beyond the native accessibility settings, several third-party apps attempted to enhance the cursor experience for users leveraging a mouse or trackpad with their iPads. These apps often focused on improving aspects like tracking speed, cursor input, scrolling speed, or offering some visual modifications to the cursor appearance.

Some apps attempted to mimic a more traditional mouse cursor or trackpad cursor experience by providing adjustable settings for tracking speed, scrolling behavior (natural scrolling), cursor border, or rounded cursor shapes. A few even offered more advanced features, such as customizable mouse settings and additional cursor features that allowed users to fine-tune their cursor experience beyond what the default iPad settings provided. However, the extent of these modifications varied, and none could significantly overhaul the native cursor control system due to system limitations imposed by Apple’s software.

While these third-party apps aimed to supplement cursor functionalities on iPads, their abilities were often confined to their individual app environments and might not have influenced the system-wide cursor behavior across all applications due to inherent restrictions within the iPadOS ecosystem.