Apple's App Store has surpassed the 25 billion download benchmark. According to Apple, China's Chunli Fu downloaded the 25 billionth app, Disney's Where's My Water? Free, and will receive a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card.

The App Store now offers more than 550,000 iOS applications across 21 categories, including more than 170,000 native applications for Apple's iPad tablet. The App Store now offers applications to consumers in 123 countries worldwide, with developer payments exceeding the $4 billion mark.

The App Store generated a record number of application downloads in January 2012, mobile user acquisition platform Fiksu reported last week. The Fiksu App Store Competitive Index, which measures the average aggregate daily download volume of the top 200 free U.S. iPhone apps, reports that App Store downloads peaked at 6.79 million daily downloads in January, up 12 percent from the previous high of 6.04 million, recorded in December 2011. Fiksu credits the proliferation of new iOS devices gifted during the holidays for driving increased app discovery and usage into the new year. 

Apple has now sold more than 315 million iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices worldwide. The iOS operating system accounts for 29.6 percent of the U.S. smartphone market according to data published last month by digital research firm comScore, trailing only Google's Android at 47.3 percent.