 <p>Renderer is an OpenGL method. OpenGL ES doesn't inherently support text. This leaves the following options:</p> <ol> <li>Use a texture, draw to it using Android's Canvas class.</li> <li>Use a library. This will most likely also draw to a texture as well.</li> <li>Create the text with polygons.</li> </ol> <p>Since your question is asking for a solution that doesn't draw to a texture, then 1 and 2 are both out. And since you want something simple, 3 is also out. Leaving no good solutions.</p> <p>An alternative to consider is to layer another view on top of the GLSurfaceView you are using. You can use a RelativeLayout to easily stack two views, one being a textview that you can anchor to the top right corner of the screen. Pseudocode below:</p> <pre><code>&lt;RelativeLayout ... /&gt; &lt;GLSurfaceView ... /&gt; &lt;TextView ... /&gt; &lt;/RelativeLayout&gt; </code></pre> <p>This approach has the benefit of pulling you out of the OpenGL requirements to do your text. I've done this successfully on a couple of my apps.</p>