GUI event-based record and replay technologies for Android apps aim at automatically capturing and playing back the UI interactions between users and apps. Record and replay are challenging because it involves a cross-understanding of three different program semantics: application difference, version evolution, and device compatibility. This study models record and replay as a search problem, and analyzes this problem from a human perspective. Accordingly, this study proposes a general framework to demonstrate the key points in record and replay: the widget representation and recording technologies, the event semantic equivalence strategies, and the local search strategies. By summarizing and analyzing existing technologies from a new perspective that is suitable for the framework, this study has a better understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of existing technologies and proposes feasible future research directions.