It did, I was just making sure. The speech bubble icon in the header is for notifications, it can be accessed from just about any page on the website. The dashboard is the page you access at inaturalist.org/home.
Unfortunately the website isn’t designed for mobile browsers and touch screens, which is probably what’s causing this. It’s possible we could get rid of these, but the underlying issue is that browsing inaturalist.org on an iPad isn’t really a good experience.