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Chinese Internet users favor "free lunches," a recent report showed.

The habit, coupled with piracy problems, has forced application developers to find better returns in overseas markets, experts and developers said.

In May, Chinese users downloaded the second-highest number of Apple's iOS apps in the world, after the United States, but the revenue generated from the downloads by Chinese users only ranked eighth, according to a report by App Annie, a Beijing-based iOS analytics and market intelligence company.

The iOS is a mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc and used in the company's hugely popular iPhone and iPad devices.

The report, released during the 2017 China Mobile Internet Innovation Carnival held in Beijing last week, tracked the downloads of apps developed for the operating system.

In China, each iOS app download generates on average about 3 US cents. The US saw the most revenue from each download, at 28 cents, followed by Japan, the UK, Australia and Germany.

"Apparently, Chinese iOS users are price-sensitive and fans of free apps," said Chen Haozhi, CEO of Beijing Touch Technology Co and the developer of Fishing Joy, a popular iPhone game.

"Many Chinese users of the iPhone or the iPad are students or people with modest incomes. They are reluctant to pay several bucks for an app," he said.

Chen is also the founder of cocoachina.com, a social networking website for iOS developers, with more than 112,000 registered users.

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