BARCELONA—Mozilla's work on mobile operating systems may end up producing a better feature phone. Here at Mobile World Congress, Chinese start-up Acadine showed off a new OS built from Mozilla's Boot to Gecko core, which Alcatel may use to build future low-cost feature phones.

Acadine "offers a new flexible platform for OEMs like Alcatel Onetouch and carriers alike," Alcatel North America president Steve Cistulli said in a statement.

Mozilla announced earlier this month that it was ending development of Firefox OS for phones, which just couldn't keep up with low-cost Android devices. Acadine's H5OS is a Linux/HTML5-based operating system forked off of Boot to Gecko, which was the core of Mozilla's Firefox OS.

About 20 percent of U.S. phone users are still on feature phones, Acadine's Jane Hsu said, but as I reported last month, carrier requirements and changing communications standards are making older feature-phone OSes obsolete. Carriers are demanding new features like voice-over LTE and enhanced push-to-talk, and even on talk-and-text-only devices, users want texting alternatives like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger so they can communicate with friends and family.

H5OS isn't compatible with Firefox OS's library of HTML5 apps, but it looks like it wouldn't be hard to port those apps over to H5OS.

Hsu also pointed out that the phone will have "a fantastic browser," so it'll be able to hit Web-based services.

Last month at CES, we saw how Kyocera is creating Android-based feature phones as one alternative. But Kyocera's rugged, enterprise-focused DuraXE costs $270. Acadine says that it can get the price of feature phones running its HTML5 OS down to about $50.

On feature phones, H5OS will require a Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 series or equivalent processor, but Hsu said that shouldn't make the phones expensive.

Acadine didn't show us the feature phone OS's user interface, saying only that it "looks just like a feature phone." Along with feature phones, H5OS can power everything from smart cameras to robots, she said.

Acadine's SDK is currently open to development partners, but it isn't freely available to individual developers, Hsu said. That's not a long-term strategy; Acadine is just a start-up with limited developer relations resources, she said, and it'll open up to a broader community "when we think we're ready."

H5OS-based consumer devices should appear by the end of this year, Hsu said.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.