Here's Why Mozilla Is Building A $US25 Smartphone

Last week, Mozilla tapped Andreas Gal as its new chief technology officer...He’s intensely focused on Firefox OS, a mobile operating system with big ambitions: winning the battle for the next two billion smartphone users.

Firefox OS only runs apps written in HTML5, the Web’s core coding language. This is a radical departure from the native app platforms that dominate the global smartphone market: Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone. Native apps can only run on the operating systems (and in Apple’s case the hardware) that they’re written for, while HTML5 apps can run on any device with a Web browser.

Gal spoke with us from Mozilla’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. just one day after his promotion...