"I feel extremely fortunate," said Fu Chunli, the Apple prize winner.

She was not a big fan of Apple, and had only purchased her iPhone one month ago and was still learning how to use the App Store. She didn't know anything about the competition until she was contacted by Apple.

When she received a call from staff at Apple (China), she thought it was a haox. "I thought he was a liar and hung up the phone without listening to his explanation," she told the a reporter from the Qingdao Evening News on Mar 6.

Fu Chunli, a citizen of Qingdao, downloaded the 25 billionth app from Apple's App Store, pushing the mobile software store to a new milestone, Apple announced on Monday.

Fu downloaded a free version of Disney's popular mobile game "Where's my water?" As the winner, she will receive a US$10,000 iTunes gift card.

She was still confused when a friend told her that she received a prize from Apple, but did not believe her luck until she saw an e mail from Apple Inc.

Many friends called her to congratulate her on her good fortune. "They said I was so lucky, not because of the prize but because the probability of winning, which was less winning than the five million RMB (US$792.3 thousand) lottery," she said.

The Apple App Store offers more than 550,000 apps to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users in 123 countries worldwide, of which more than 170,000 apps are for iPad users. Apple has paid more than US$4 billion to developers.

Downloads from the App Store have been accelerating steadily since it was launched in mid-2008. The number of downloads reached 10 billion in January, 2011.

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