Thanks for your interest in SQLCipher and for posting to the SQLCipher discussion forum.
Just to confirm, is it GRDB itself which is including a sqlite3 dependency or is a separate third party library? Could you post your current Podfile (if you’re using Cocoa pods)?
In the Xcode 8 Advisory article you linked there are instructions for how to ensure that SQLCipher is linked first (under Project Setup for Linking). Have you tried those instructions? You’ll want to make sure that SQLCipher is linked before any ${inherited} as well (as that could be linking standard sqlite3).
Note: including SQLCipher in a project which also include standard sqlite3 is considered unsupported. While the above recommendations may work, we don’t provide direct support for it.
I’d also recommend using the rest of the recommendations from that article (Runtime check/Testing & Verification).
Here’s an example of someone who was using Google-Mobile-Ads-SDK in conjunction with SQLCipher and used the recommendations the article you linked which worked for them: Cannot open encrypted database with SQLCipher 4 - #4 by mmoore
If you’re unable to get this to work, I’d recommend trying to simplify which pods are conflicting and creating an example project which displays the issue, uploading it to GitHub and posting it here for review.
Note: We (Zetetic) don’t develop or maintain GRDB