What is the main purpose of using the Factory Method pattern in software design?

The main goal of the Factory Method pattern is to separate the creation of objects from their usage, allowing subclasses to decide which class to instantiate. This increases flexibility and extensibility of the code, avoiding tight coupling to specific classes when creating objects.

Example: instead of directly calling the constructor of a specific class, a factory method is called, which returns an object of the required type, making it easier to add new types without changing the client code.