How to present a picklist on mobile?

[Ben Rubinstein]

I'm making yet another attempt to get more seriously into cross-platform 
mobile, having not focused on this for a long time, during which I know the 
state of the art has moved forward.  I'm working on a little app for in-house use.

I want to present the user with a list, for them to make a choice from.  The 
list has short titles, and longer descriptions: eg
	Apple	A round hard fruit
	Orange	A soft round fruit
	Banana	A long soft fruit, generally yellow

The list may be quite long - anywhere from 5 to 30 entries.  I may well want 
to present users with a shorter list of usual choices, with a "more..." or 
similar option to get the full list.  (There are actually a bunch of these 
lists, and they're somewhat dynamic, generated from data periodically 
retrieved from a server.)

On the desktop, I'd most likely just put it all in an option or popup menu, 
with a tab between the short code and decription - ugly, but easy and handles 
scrolling etc.  If I was feeling generous I might make a more carefully 
formatted scrolling field, or even a scrolling group of styled objects.

But I don't want to do this for the desktop; I want to do it for smartphones, 
iOS and Android, including 'retina' devices (not bother about iPads or other 
tablets).

On iOS, last time I looked, a standard picker will just display the short 
codes in a reasonable manner. If I used the option menu approach, the 
description will probably be truncated to almost nothing (and I don't think 
tabs will format well).  If I use the styled field approach, then it feels 
clunky to the user because the field doesn't have the native scrolling feel 
(ie bounce etc).

I'm aware that in the long time since I last got into this, there's been all 
sorts of developments around giving more access to native controls, and other 
ways of giving a more native feel.

I know close to nothing about how things stand on Android.  I'm keen for this 
app to be as cross-platform as possible - both to minimise effort, and to 
demonstrate to colleagues the LC advantage.  But I also want (especially for 
the latter reason) for it not to be clunkly, especially on iOS.

So given all this - what would the wise heads recommend as my approach to this 
requirement, that ideally will give a good effect, on both iOS and Android, 
without massive work?

(I'm aware that an ideal solution for all constraints may well not exist, and 
would welcome discussion of various approaches that represent different 
compromises between these requirements.)

Many thanks in advance,

Ben