Any corruption of the RPM database (that can't be automatically repaired) is quite scary for a mobile phone, where the user will have no chance of repairing this. A full reformat and reinstall of all apps will be needed - can only hope they have separate data backups, as a full system restore might simply recover the corrupt RPM database.
Not sure how APT/dpkg compares here, I've seen some reports of dpkg corruption that were easily recoverable from.