I fell over this the other day. If you have both the .a and .dylib in the same directory, Xcode will link in the .dylib even if you've explicitly added the .a to your "Link with ..." in the build phases of your project. If you look in the build log, you will see that the linker cmd line that Xcode generates for (say) libFoo.a  is something like:

ld .... -lFoo ....

with the result that you (& I) have found. I tried adding various linker-extra flags to force it to use the .a, but in the end, I gave up and put the .a and .dylibs in separate directories (and changed the library search paths as needed).

Regards