Background App Refresh Never Works

Hello all, I'm hoping someone can assist me on this. So you know, I am not a novice user, I am an IT support specialist so I have in depth knowledge of computers and how software works, plus I have been in the cellular industry for 15+ years giving me a solid background on the usage of most all mobile operating systems. Now that I got that out of the way, here is my dilemma.

As I understand it, Background App Refresh was introduced by Apple to allow 3rd party apps to periodically refresh its data so that when you launch the app, you don't have to wait for it to refresh and load the new data. For instance the Gmail app from Google with background app refresh is supposed to download the emails in the background even if you're not using it, so that when you launch the app, you don't have to wait for those new emails to load and for the app to update itself, the new emails will already be loaded and waiting. Well, this has never worked for me. I've used iOS and iPhones since the iPhone 4S, and am currently running iOS 8.3 on an iPhone 6 Plus. I have never ever seen this work as advertised, no matter which app I'm using, whether it's the Gmail app, Facebook, Twitter, Flipboard, etc. etc. I have all options checked in settings to allow for background app refresh for each app I want, but every single time I launch one of those 3rd party apps, I have to wait for it to load all the new content before I can see the new updates. Push notifications works as advertised 95% of the time, but background app refresh never does.

I can't see how this happens on every single iPhone I've tried, so I'm asking, do you see this? Am I the only one? My guess is that the 1GB of RAM in the iPhones hinders the background app refresh, but that doesn't explain how I have never seen this feature actually ever work properly. Of course all the first party apps works like this such as Mail, Contact, Calendars, but no 3rd party apps.

Thoughts?