I have tried to place some components behind the SurfaceView without success.

After looking through the reference, it states that:

“SurfaceView punches a hole in its window to allow its surface to be displayed. The view hierarchy will take care of correctly compositing with the Surface any siblings of the SurfaceView that would normally appear on top of it.”

That means you can’t actually place anything behind it so the only way is to draw through canvas that SurfaceView provides.