Android :: Adding Views To Another View

Is there a possibility to add a view or derivative (button, textview, imageview etc...) to another view without having to go through layouts?

I have a class called ScreenView, it derives from View (e.g. public class ScreenView extends View).
I wanted to display text into it, labels, images etc..

On an iPhone it's trivial, simply create my objects and use addSubview method ; you can embed any UI objects into another. Most UI toolkits work that way too.

Problem with layouts is that I haven't found an easy way to properly position a subview (say a text view) in a given location of the enclosing View. I want one to contain the other...

I was hoping I had missed something in the documentation (which is far from being intuitive that's for sure) and I could do something like myView.addView(subview). But it ain't so :)

As a side question, what is the closest to iPhone's UILabel in the Android world?
A UILabel can contain a text or a graphic. Right now I've been using TextView and ImageView but they aren't anywhere as flexible when it comes to layout as a UILabel

Edit: Making my View inherit from ViewGoup instead, let me add subview..
However, I want to draw in my view. I found that when ScreenView extends ViewGroup, the onDraw function is never called then.

Something like:

CODE:..........

Would paint in yellow my view if ScreenView extends View ; but not if it extends ViewGroup.

How do you draw directly in the view then?