 <p>You cannot.</p> <blockquote> <p>A Service is an application component that can perform long-running operations in the background and does not provide a user interface.</p> </blockquote> <p><a href="https://developer.android.com/guide/components/services.html" rel="nofollow">https://developer.android.com/guide/components/services.html</a></p> <p>However, you can still alter the view of a running activity from the service! For this you should bind the activity and the service. See <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9001183/android-how-to-use-mediacontroller-in-service-class/10768417#10768417">here</a> for some example code</p>